How Polling Trends Influence Compensational Coalition-Voting

Abstract

Compensational voting refers to when voters cast a vote for a more extreme party than they prefer, in order to push policies closer to an ideal point. This article develops the idea of compensational voting in regard to pre-electoral coalition signals and polling trends. The argument is that a significant share of voters consider the relative strength of the parties in their preferred pre-electoral coalition, and adjust their vote choice accordingly. This is elaborated by conducting a mixed logit model over eight Swedish general elections where parties were more or less clear about their intentions to collaborate with other parties. Combining unique data from parties’ election manifestos including negative and positive quotes about other parties with polling trends and voters’ approval rating of parties, the analysis lends support to the idea that this type of coalition-oriented compensational voting occurs.

Reevaluating the Influence of Leaders Under Proportional Representation: Quantitative Analysis of Text in an Electoral Experiment

“…The case for the study is the proportional representation system of Sweden, which was long dominated by the single party Social Democrats governments. More recently it has oriented toward coalitions of parties (Bäck and Bergman, 2016;Fredén, 2021). The party system of 2018 consisted of three bigger parties (the Social Democrats, the Moderates, and the Sweden Democrats) and five smaller parties (Greens, Liberals, Left party, Centre party, and Christian Democrats).…”