Do voters want their parties to be office- or policy-seekers in coalition negotiations?

Abstract

Do voters want their party to be office- or policy-seekers in coalition negotiations? This question has been left unstudied in political science research so far. While existing research shows that policies matter for voters when forming their preferences for coalitions, in this study it is argued that voters find it at the same time important that their preferred party gains offices. Specifically, voters’ office-seeking considerations are expected to increase the more indifferent they are to the policy content of a coalition agreement. To test this assumption, an original conjoint experiment among Green Party voters in the context of the German federal election in 2021 has been conducted. The findings demonstrate that voters’ office-seeking considerations become more important the more similar coalition agreements are with regard to their policy content. These findings have important implications for the understanding of voters’ preferences regarding coalitions.

Keywords:

• Coalition preferences
• coalition agreements
• survey experiment
• voter preferences

Acknowledgements

A previous version of the manuscript has been presented at the Comparative Politics Research Seminar at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, and at the annual meeting of the DVPW research section ‘Governmental System and Governance in Germany’ in 2022. We thank the participants for their helpful comments and suggestions. Furthermore, Martin Gross acknowledges funding from the LMUexcellent Postdoc Support Fund. The project was funded by the University of Oldenburg as part of their FLiF+ program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We restrict our argument here to majority coalition governments since single-party majority governments, single-party minority governments, and minority government coalitions still are less common than majority coalition governments (Thürk et al. 2021).

2 Assuming that other parties from the center-right and center-left are also interested in joining a coalition with the centrist party and that the centrist party does not belong to one of the two ‘ideological camps’.

3 For the sake of simplicity, our theoretical argument is based on the assumption that all voters are informed about politics to the same extent, thus disregarding the varying levels of political awareness between and within the different groups of voters and party supporters (see e.g. Fortunato et al. 2016). We discuss potential ways of refining this assumption to capture the varying levels of voters’ political awareness in the conclusion.

4 Of course, minority governments would be a possible outcome of government formation processes in Germany but never happened at the federal level and are also very uncommon at the sub-national level (see Bräuninger et al. 2019; Debus and Gross 2016).

5 The experiment was not pre-registered. Future studies could test and corroborate our findings based on a pre-registered design.

6 The exact wording of the introduction to the conjoint experiment as well as the decision screen presented to the respondents can be found in the online appendix.

7 This, of course, simplified the real-world constellations Green voters were facing because joining a coalition as “junior partner” with CDU/CSU and FDP, two parties from the right-wing ideological camp, would definitely result in a different coalition agreement than the one agreed upon with the SPD and the FDP, where the Greens and the SPD – two parties from the left-wing ideological camp – would have more influence during coalition bargaining. We discuss this in the conclusion in further detail.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.

Notes on contributors

Martin Gross

Martin Gross is Substitute Professor for Political Systems and European Integration at LMU Munich. His research focuses on the analysis of party competition and government formation in multi-level systems, political representation in democratic regimes, and EU cohesion policy. His previous work has been published, among others, in Political Studies, Party Politics, and the European Political Science Review. [[email protected]]

Michael Jankowski

Michael Jankowski is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oldenburg. His research focuses on party competition, candidate selection, and political representation. His previous work has been published, among others, in Political Analysis, the European Journal of Political Research, and the Journal of European Public Policy. [[email protected]]

Christina-Marie Juen

Christina-Marie Juen is a postdoctoral researcher at TU Darmstadt. Her research focuses on the political attitudes and behaviour of voters and party elites. She is also interested in analysing the political representation of underrepresented groups. Her work has been published in journals such as the European Journal of Political Research and Party Politics. [[email protected]]

Florian Erlbruch

Florian Erlbruch is a MA student and research assistant at the University of Oldenburg in the Working Group Political System of Germany. [[email protected]]