Expectation of Coalition Formation in Multi-Party Settings

• In Event: Electoral Institutions

Abstract

In coalition settings, when voters cast a ballot do they have a sense of who will form the government? The answer to this question is of relevance to questions of accountability; voters may well vote against a particular incumbent government but presumably would like some sense of what alternative will replace it. The answer is also relevant to the literature on strategic voting in coalition systems. Typically, studies of these topics rely on national level elections. But national level settings are themselves somewhat atypical electoral settings. First, these are likely to be information rich environments and provide unusually good conditions for voters to form expectations about the range of possible outcomes. In addition, studies which compare across national contexts often contain a great deal of institutional and cultural variation which muddy the focus on expectations. For these reasons, we use pre-election surveys from 19 German state elections between 2009 and 2017, in addition to three federal elections, to explore how voters form expectations in multi-party settings. We observe large variation in the ability of voters to predict actual government formation, ranging from 10 to 75 per cent. Both on the national and the subnational level we find robust evidence for ‘wishful thinking’ when predicting a government. We also find that public opinion polls heavily influence voter expectations about government formation. Our results have implications for the role of strategic voting in multiparty settings and, also, for an understanding of the ‘simple act of voting’ in complex settings.

Authors

• Shaun Bowler, University of California, Riverside

• Gail McElroy, Trinity College, Dublin

• Stefan Müller, Trinity College Dublin