Should I stay or should I go? An experimental study on voter responses to pre‐electoral coalitions

Abstract

Abstract. Pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) are one of the most often used methods to coordinate entry into the electoral market. Party elites, however, do not know how voters will respond to the coalition formation at the polls. In this article, the authors report on an experimental study among 1,255 Belgian students. In order to study voter responses to the formation of PECs, respondents were presented with two ballots: one with individual parties (party vote condition) and one with coalitions (coalition vote condition). The aim of this experiment is to predict under what conditions party supporters will follow their initially preferred party into the coalition and vote for the PEC, and under what conditions they would desert the PEC at the polls. The decision whether to follow the coalition or not can be traced back to four considerations: dislike of the coalition partner; ideological congruence between coalition partners; size of the initially preferred party; and being attracted to a specific high-profile candidate. (Dis)liking the coalition partner is independent from the ideological congruence between the two coalition partners. The study's results also show support for an adjustment effect, as respondents became more loyal toward cartels over the course of the 2003-2005 observation period.

Weighting Parties and Coalitions: How Coalition Signals Influence Voting Behavior

“…They also help voters to figure out which party they should support to vote their most preferred coalition into office. This also nicely complements previous accounts from Belgium (Gschwend and Hooghe 2008) and Poland (Kaminski 2001, 302), indicating that voters do not blindly follow those signals. Thus, coalition signals can offer valuable information to hold the government accountable and to identify potential future governments, particularly in an environment that is typically characterized as providing voters only with low levels of accountability.…”

“…If a voter dislikes the signaled coalition partner of her most preferred party, she might defect from her preferred party and instead cast her vote for a party that makes this coalition less likely. Evidence from recent Austrian, German, and Belgian elections is consistent with this type of voting behavior in multiparty systems (Gschwend and Hooghe 2008;Herrmann 2014;Linhart 2009;. In short, the recent literature indicates that coalition considerations matter above and beyond party considerations for electoral behavior in multiparty systems (e.g., Aldrich et al 2004;Bargsted and Kedar 2009;Blais et al 2006;Duch, May, and Armstrong 2010;Kedar 2011;Meffert and Gschwend 2010).…”

Eine Disziplin auf der Suche nach Wissenschaftlichkeit: Entwicklung und Stand der Methoden in der deutschen Politikwissenschaft

“…Auch findet man den verstärkten Einsatz formaler oder spieltheoretischer Modelle (Bräuninger 2007) als Grundlage der statistischen Modellierung (Hermann/Pappi 2008;Debus 2009). Ansätze der experimentellen Politikwissenschaft wurden aufgegriffen, um den Effekt von Koalitionssignalen (Gschwend/Hooghe 2008) oder den Einfluss von Information (Meffert et al 2006) auf das Wahlverhalten zu studieren.…”

Explaining the Green vote: Belgian local elections, 1994–2006

“…In a cartel, two or more parties enter the elections with one common list. By doing so, they hope to obtain more votes and seats than they would have obtained when entering the elections with a separate list for each party (Gschwend and Hooghe 2008). In 2006, Green parties participated in a pre-electoral cartel in 47 municipalities, mostly with the Socialist party.…”