Coalition Preferences and Voting Behaviour at the 2009 German Federal Election

Abstract

Coalitions are the regular type of government in most parliamentary systems. Consequently, when going to the polls voters have to keep in mind that a coalition will most certainly be formed after the election even though they are voting for a party. Research on the matter how voters deal with coalitions as political objects is still rather sparse. In our paper we thus analyze how voters formed evaluations about coalitions and how these evaluations influenced voting behavior at the 2009 German federal election. Given that various coalition options were heavily debated before the election and polls were inconclusive about the likely outcome of the election, voters had the opportunity to learn about different coalition options and to generate coalition evaluations. With the extensive data of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) at hand, we are able to show that coalition evaluations are meaningful political attitudes which have the potential to influence voting behaviour in multiparty systems on top of party and leader evaluations.