Abstract Research shows that voters use coalition decisions as a heuristic to infer party positions, but little work has studied whether coalition decisions have long-term effects. I argue that voters have longer-lasting impressions of coalition relationships that affect their perceptions of parties after any given coalition ends. Voters keep a running tally of which parties have governed together and update their perceptions of current coalitions based on these prior expectations. Using data from ParlGov and CSES, I analyze coalition relationships across European countries to model the inter-dependencies between party dyads. The results of this analysis show that voters view parties that have previously coalesced as closer together when neither party is in government, as long as they do not change partners, and voters have the strongest reactions to unprecedented and exclusive coalition partnerships.
Kendall Curtis (Tue,) studied this question.