Do Voters Prefer Logrolling to Compromise in Parliamentary Democracies

• In Event: Citizens and Coalition Politics: A Democratic Challenge?

Abstract

Parties run election campaigns by taking stances on various policy issues. Often however, implementing these policies requires deals with competitors who have different issue stances. Such deals can take two forms: policy compromises on individual issues or logrolls where each party gets to keep its position on one issue while conceding on another one. We study what types of deals voters are willing to accept in these negotiations based on a pre-registered survey experiment conducted after the 2021 Dutch general election. We find no evidence that respondents prefer logroll deals over policy compromises per se. Rather, voters prefer logroll deals to compromises only if the party they voted for is able to secure its position on an issue that also aligns with their voters’ preferences and is highly salient to them. Our results have wider implications for political representation and government formation processes

Authors

• Alejandro Ecker, Heidelberg University

• Thomas M Meyer

• Carolina Plescia, University of Vienna