Between cabinet membership and opposition: Commitment and responsibility of support parties

Abstract

Existing research suggests that government participation is crucial for how voters evaluate party performance and how they cast their votes. However, in real life the distinction between government and opposition is not as straight-forward as one would think. Minority governments often enjoy the legislative support of external support parties, which play an ambiguous role in politics: while they are formally part of the opposition, they are simultaneously committed to keeping the government in office and passing its bills. How do voters evaluate parties that support a minority government? Will they respond to different frames about the significance of the commitment that support parties have made to government policy and survival? In a survey experiment, I test whether framing a written agreement as effective will cause voters to attribute more or less responsibility to the support parties and find that they respond to different frames by altering their perceptions of the importance of the agreement, but not their responsibility attribution.

Punishing the pseudo‐opposition: Accountability under a minority government

“…Perceived government performance has a systematic effect on how voters feel about support parties. This supports previous findings showing that voters view support parties as tied to the governmentand even sometimes part of government (Hjermitslev, 2022;Tromborg et al, 2019).…”

“…While some voters perceive support parties as a separate category when given the option, support parties are clearly tied to the government in the minds of voters. Some even think of support parties as part of the government (Hjermitslev, 2022; Tromborg et al., 2019). Connecting that to recent findings suggesting that partisans have more positive feelings towards out‐parties that are co‐governing with their own party (Gidron et al., 2023), it seems plausible that a positive evaluation of the government would extend to support parties.…”

“…This notion of democracy is simple and requires only that citizens know who was responsible for policy making. Unfortunately, this is no trivial request: Under minority governments, it is also necessary to hold pseudo-opposition parties, that is, parties supporting minority rule (Hjermitslev, 2022), accountable.…”