Political Interest and the Perils of Policy Compromise in Multiparty Governments

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

Abstract

Political interest and active political engagement are usually seen as ‘’civic virtues’’ in democratic publics. As recent work has argued, however, heightened interest in politics can lead to undesirable consequences, such as motivated reasoning, greater affective polarization, and ideological extremism. Supporting those arguments, mounting survey research (mostly conducted in the American context) has suggested that more politically interested and engaged citizens tend to be less willing to support cross-party compromise and to evince more hostile views of the ‘’other side’’ of the political aisle. In this paper, we explore the relationship between political interest and voter support for compromise in multiparty democracies—where collective decision-making between parties (particularly within the executive) is an absolute necessity if government is to function. In an empirical examination of more than a dozen panel studies across six European democracies, we find a clear relationship between the extent to which voters reward or punish compromise by government parties and their level of political interest. Specifically, we show that politically highly-interested voters for a government party who believe that their party has moved ideologically closer to its coalition allies are less likely to support that party in the future. We find no such hostility towards compromise among voters who have little interest in politics.

Authors

• Lanny W. Martin, Bocconi University

• Georg Vanberg, Duke University