The Audience of Coalition Bargaining: Voter Reactions to Portfolio Allocation

Abstract

Abstract Obtaining portfolios is one of the most important pay-offs that parties receive from getting into office. Accordingly, we know a lot about how portfolios are distributed between coalition partners, but surprisingly little about how voters react to these distributional outcomes. We address this research gap both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that voters use cues from the quantitative and qualitative portfolio distributions to evaluate coalition partners’ competence in negotiations, which in turn shapes party support. Empirically, we use original experimental and panel survey data from the 2022 Danish general election. We find that voters infer negotiation competence from the number, power, and party-specific salience of the portfolios a party obtains. We also demonstrate that many voters paid attention to the real-world negotiation outcome and withdrew their support for the parties they perceived handled the negotiations less competently.