Collaboration or competition? Experimental evidence for coalition heuristics

Abstract

Does coalition formation have a causal effect on the perceived ideological distance between the coalition members? Observational research shows that voters typically think of parties that form a coalition government as more ideologically similar than those that do not, holding everything else constant. Their many qualities aside, the existing studies are not able to establish a causal relationship between coalition formation and changing perceptions. It is quite possible that voters are reacting to concurrent changes in parties' stated policy and not the coalition information itself. In this paper, I present two survey experiments that isolate the difference between telling voters that two parties can cooperate and telling them that they cannot. In both experiments, I find evidence supporting the theory of coalition heuristics.

Affective polarization and coalition signals

“…First, our paper provides a new perspective into the effects of coalitions and coalition signals on voters. Previous research has shown that participating in coalitions and showing the willingness to cooperate reduce perceived ideological distance (Fortunato and Stevenson, 2013;Adams et al, 2016;Falcó-Gimeno and Muñnozoz, 2017;Falcó-Gimeno and Fernandez-Vazquez, 2020;Hjermitslev, 2022). We show that coalition signals have effects that go beyond voter perceptions of elite politics.…”

“…Hence, one reason why coalition signals will decrease perceptions of threat is because they affect perceptions of ideological distance. We know from prior research that parties in coalition are seen as being closer together ideologically (Fortunato and Stevenson, 2013;Adams et al, 2016;Falcó-Gimeno and Fernandez-Vazquez, 2020;Hjermitslev, 2022). Given the difficulty of acquiring detailed ideological information of party positions, voters use cooperation in a coalition as a heuristic for the ideological position of parties.…”

“…Our key expectation is that, when party elites signal that they can work and govern together, there will be a decrease in the mutual affective dislike among their partisans. In addition to examining the overall effect of coalition signals on affective distance, we also examine whether these effects are due to changes to perceived ideological distance (Fortunato and Stevenson, 2013;Falcó-Gimeno and Muñoz, 2017;Hjermitslev, 2022) and/or due to warmer personal relations between party leaders (Huddy and Yair, 2021). We test our expectations in an online survey experiment conducted in Austria in fall 2021.…”

A compromising mindset? How citizens evaluate the trade‐offs in coalition politics

“…This has been found to be the case across a number of West European countries (Gschwend et al., 2017; Irwin & van Holsteyn, 2012; Marsh, 2010; Meffert et al., 2011; Sohlberg & Fredén, 2020). Citizens have coalition preferences (Debus & Müller, 2014; Plescia & Aichholzer, 2017) and they use coalition participation as an information heuristic (Fortunato & Stevenson, 2013) to extract information about policy positions from coalition behaviour (Bowler et al., 2020; Falcó‐Gimeno & Muñoz, 2017; Fortunato & Adams, 2015; Hjermitslev, 2023; Spoon & Klüver, 2017). From this perspective, it is remarkable how little is known about how citizens view the compromising that per definition is involved in coalition building.…”

What drives perceptions of partisan cooperation?

“…This is an important focus of study not only because of its obvious relevance to the question of whether citizens are interested in and knowledgeable about partisan politics, but also because the idea that citizens have sensible beliefs about patterns of partisan cooperation and conflict plays a central role in many contemporary explanations of electoral behavior in multiparty democracies. This includes theories of coalition-directed voting (Bargsted and Kedar, 2009), how voters form expectations about likely coalitions (Hobolt and Karp, 2010;Lachance, 2023), how voters perceive party policy positions (Adams et al, 2021;Lee et al, 2021;Hjermitslev, 2023), rational retrospective voting (Duch and Stevenson, 2008;Hobolt et al, 2013), and voters' electoral responses to partisan cooperation (Harbridge and Malhotra, 2011).…”