Voters' short-term responsiveness to coalition deals

Government formation in multiparty systems requires election winners to strike deals to form a coalition government. Do voters respond and how do they respond to coalition government deals? This paper examines the short-term consequences of coalition government formation on voters in European democracies relying on survey panel data and original content analysis of coalition agreements. It tests theoretical expectations that deal with both the actual and perceived ideological shifts parties make when joining coalition deals as well as the effect of a much simpler heuristic cue based on preferences. The findings indicate that coalition deals have consequences on party preferences, but voter perceptions play a much stronger effect than the actual content of coalition deals. These results have important implications for our understanding of public opinion and provide important insights into the current difficulties and challenges of government formation and representative democracy

Government alternation and proximity voting: how policy change opportunities shape electoral behaviour

A landmark finding in recent research on electoral behaviour is that voters anticipate the postelection bargaining process among potential members of the governing coalition, and that these anticipated policy agreements inform their vote choice. In this article, this finding is qualified by arguing, and then showing empirically, that when the expected policy change after the elections is marginal or non-existent, ceteris paribus, ‘simple’ proximity voting should prevail. The argument is tested by using two different but complementary research strategies applied to an individual-level data set constructed from electoral surveys in 28 countries over a 20-year period, and two recent national surveys in which respondents were directly asked to predict the potential coalition government after the elections. Both strategies provide support for the hypothesis and have important implications for the understanding of the consequences of government alternation on voting behaviour and political representation more broadly

An evaluation of the performance and suitability of R\ua0 7\ua0C methods for ecological inference with known true values

Ecological inference refers to the study of individuals using aggregate data and it is used in an impressive number of studies; it is well known, however, that the study of individuals using group data suffers from an ecological fallacy problem (Robinson in Am Sociol Rev 15:351\u2013357, 1950). This paper evaluates the accuracy of two recent methods, the Rosen et al. (Stat Neerl 55:134\u2013156, 2001) and the Greiner and Quinn (J R Stat Soc Ser A (Statistics in Society) 172:67\u201381, 2009) and the long-standing Goodman\u2019s (Am Sociol Rev 18:663\u2013664, 1953; Am J Sociol 64:610\u2013625, 1959) method designed to estimate all cells of R 7 C tables simultaneously by employing exclusively aggregate data. To conduct these tests we leverage on extensive electoral data for which the true quantities of interest are known. In particular, we focus on examining the extent to which the confidence intervals provided by the three methods contain the true values. The paper also provides important guidelines regarding the appropriate contexts for employing these models

National identity profiles and support for the European Union

Scholars have long recognized that national identity-related factors are among the strongest predictors of citizens’ attitudes toward the European Union. But while some find that they reinforce support for the European Union, other scholars show that national identity undermines its support. In this article, we aim to disentangle this puzzle by studying how the national identity profiles of European citizens relate to support for the European Union across individuals and member states. To this end, we employ data from the International Social Survey Program 2013, by far the most extensive collection of survey questions on national identity, and the technique of latent class analysis. Our results show which specific configurations of national identity entail support, ambivalence or rejection of the European Union, their antecedents, and their variation across countries

Do European elections enhance satisfaction with EU democracy?

Elections carry the potential to increase citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. As Carolina Plescia, Jean-François Daoust and André Blais explain, previous research has shown that this effect is apparent among those who take part in national elections, rather than abstain, and among voters who back ‘winners’ rather than ‘losers’. Drawing on original panel data collected during the 2019 European Parliament elections in eight countries, they demonstrate that while electoral participation and backing a winning party do increase satisfaction with EU democracy, this effect does not materialise among citizens with an exclusive national identity

Do party supporters accept policy compromises in coalition governments?

Coalition governments generally involve policy compromises from the parties involved, but how do party supporters react to these agreements? Drawing on a new study covering the Spanish general election in November 2019, Carolina Plescia, Alejandro Ecker and Thomas M. Meyer find that the more attached voters are to parties, the harder it is for them to accept compromises. There is also evidence that voters find it more difficult to give in on important issues

Filling the void? Political responsiveness of populist parties

This paper examines the responsiveness of populist parties to the salience of issues amongst the public focusing on a large number of issues on which parties campaign during elections. The paper investigates both left- and right-wing populist parties comparatively in three countries, namely Austria, Germany and Italy. We find that while populist parties carry out an important responsiveness function, they are only slightly more responsive than their mainstream counterparts on the issues they own. The results of this paper have important implications for our understanding of political representation and the future of the populist appeal

Estimating Sensitive Behavior: The ICT and High-Incidence Electoral Behavior

Funding This work is supported by the Austrian National Election Study, a National Research Network sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (S10902-G11). Acknowledgments The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and Graeme Blair and Kosuke Imai for their helpful support.Peer reviewedPublisher PD