Show Me Your Friends: A Survey Experiment on the Effect of Coalition Signals

Abstract

Recent studies of coalition-directed voting suggest that what political parties say during a campaign can influence voter perceptions of the likelihood of certain coalitions and that this, in turn, may foster strategic voting in multiparty systems. Here, we expand this argument and show that preelection coalition signals also have the potential to influence voter perceptions of the parties themselves. By revealing their coalition preferences, parties provide information on where they stand on the political continuum. We test our argument using a survey experiment run during a regional election campaign in Spain in which we manipulated the coalition signals emitted by two parties: one, a traditional social democratic party and, the second, a new liberal party. Results show how coalition signals can significantly influence the party’s position and, ultimately, affect voters’ stated probability of voting, especially in the case of the recently founded party.