Coordination and presidential coattails

Abstract

Parties often enter pre-election coalitions (PECs) in presidential elections while remaining independent in legislative races. Parties that support a presidential candidate should see legislative gains given the increase in their national electoral profile. Yet fewer presidential candidates often leads to fewer legislative parties, suggesting that participation in PECs reduces parties’ independent legislative representation. In this article, we examine how specific strategies in the presidential race affect parties’ legislative vote share. Using an original dataset of over 2300 party-level observations in 23 democracies across Europe and South America from 1975 to 2010, we show that the benefits of a party’s presidential strategy are conditional on its size. We find that smaller parties benefit from coattails when they run on their own or lead a PEC, while no parties benefit from joining a PEC. Our findings have important implications for understanding how parties’ presidential strategies influence their legislative success and system-level legislative fragmentation.