Coalition Signals Research Articles

A Most Dangerous Tale: the Universality, Evolution, and Function of Blood Libels

Abstract Blood libels are narratives about Jews and Christians, featuring an accusation that a child or a woman had been kidnapped and assaulted due to religious or economic goals. Blood libel-like narratives, however, are not only found in Judeo-Christian history; they appear in many cultures. Using the framework of Cultural Attraction Theory, the paper considers their evolution, and identifies testable factors of attraction. The paper makes two claims regarding the morphology and the function of these ancient tales. Firstly, narratives about outgroups tend to evolve towards the shape of a blood libel, as it taps into an optimum number of universal cognitive preferences. The correspondence with the evolved features of the mind contributes to the success of the narrative in different cultures and time periods. Secondly, these narratives function as coalition signals. Upon calling ingroup members into action against an outgroup, the blood libel unifies audiences before engaging in exclusionary action.

Music production and its role in coalition signaling during foraging contexts in a hunter-gatherer society.

Music is a cultural activity universally present in all human societies. Several hypotheses have been formulated to understand the possible origins of music and the reasons for its emergence. Here, we test two hypotheses: (1) the coalition signaling hypothesis which posits that music could have emerged as a tool to signal cooperative intent and signal strength of alliances and (2) music as a strategy to deter potential predators. In addition, we further explore the link between tactile cues and the propensity of mothers to sing toward infants. For this, we investigated the singing behaviors of hunter-gatherer mothers during daily foraging trips among the Mbendjele BaYaka in the Republic of the Congo. Although singing is a significant component of their daily activities, such as when walking in the forest or collecting food sources, studies on human music production in hunter-gatherer societies are mostly conducted during their ritual ceremonies. In this study, we collected foraging and singing behavioral data of mothers by using focal follows of five BaYaka women during their foraging trips in the forest. In accordance with our predictions for the coalition signaling hypothesis, women were more likely to sing when present in large groups, especially when group members were less familiar. However, predictions of the predation deterrence hypothesis were not supported as the interaction between group size and distance from the village did not have a significant effect on the likelihood of singing. The latter may be due to limited variation in predation risk in the foraging areas, because of the intense bush meat trade, and hence, future studies should include foraging areas with higher densities of wild animals. Lastly, we found that mothers were more likely to sing when they were carrying infants compared to when infants were close, but carried by others, supporting the prediction that touch plays an important prerequisite role in musical interaction between the mother and child. Our study provides important insight into the role of music as a tool in displaying the intent between or within groups to strengthen potentially conflict-free alliances during joint foraging activities.

Affective polarization and coalition signals

AbstractAffective polarization between partisans is potentially troubling for liberal democracy. Hence, recent research has focused on how affective dislike between partisans can be reduced. Using a survey experiment in Austria, we test whether elite signals matter. Respondents exposed to fictional news stories implying that their in-party might form a coalition with an out-party show reduced dislike toward supporters of that out-party. Our experiment also shows that coalition signals can influence out-party affect even if neither of the two parties signaling cooperation are an in-party. We conclude that cooperation between rivals has an important role in reducing affective polarization.

Electoral coalition signals and voter perceptions

AbstractHow do electoral coalition signals affect voters' perceptions of party positions and coalition behavior in parliamentary democracies? Scholars have found that coalition signals can influence how voters view policy positions of parties. Extending research on the impact of government coalition participation on voter perceptions, a recent study found that Spanish voters update their perceptions of party positions when they receive a signal that a party joined an electoral coalition, believing it to be farther to the left (right) if the signal was of a left- (right-)leaning coalition. That study also found, in agreement with the literature, that electoral coalition signals lead to expectations of future coalition behavior. Much of the literature on electoral coalitions focuses on parliamentary democracies in Europe that use proportional representation. Since the effects of electoral coalitions might vary across contexts, we conduct a similar survey experiment in Japan, a parliamentary democracy that uses a mixed electoral system with an important disproportional component. We find no evidence that electoral coalition signals affect how Japanese voters view the ideological positions of parties, a result that matches a similar analysis conducted in Sweden. However, some coalition signals – if they contain new information – do increase Japanese respondents' expectations that certain coalitions are more likely to form in the future.

Voter expectations of government formation in coalition systems: The importance of the information context

AbstractCan voters in multi‐party systems predict which coalition will form the government with any degree of accuracy? To date, studies which explore voter expectations of coalition formation have emphasized individual level attributes, such as education, but the complexity of the environment at the time the coalitions are forming should also be consequential in enabling (or handicapping) voters in forming expectations. We examine the relative effects of individual level attributes (e.g., education, cognitive mobilization) versus contextual factors (e.g., information availability) in 19 German state elections and 3 German general elections between 2009 and 2017. We find that the ease of identifiability of alternative future governments varies significantly across multi‐party systems. We find that respondents are more likely to predict governments that they would like to see in office, that have a higher probability of receiving a majority of seats, and that consist of ideologically proximate parties. Combining survey data with a novel indicator of coalition signals, measured through a quantitative text analysis of newspaper coverage, we also find that voters consider positive pre‐election coalition signals when predicting the government. Finally, we find that the information environment is much more relevant for correct coalition predictions than individual‐level characteristics of respondents. Although individual attributes do influence predictive ability, these factors are strongly dominated by the context in which the prediction is taking place. The information environment has by far the largest effect on predicting coalition outcomes. Our results have implications for the literature on strategic voting in multi‐party settings, as well as the literature on accountability.

How Polling Trends Influence Compensational Coalition-Voting

Compensational voting refers to when voters cast a vote for a more extreme party than they prefer, in order to push policies closer to an ideal point. This article develops the idea of compensational voting in regard to pre-electoral coalition signals and polling trends. The argument is that a significant share of voters consider the relative strength of the parties in their preferred pre-electoral coalition, and adjust their vote choice accordingly. This is elaborated by conducting a mixed logit model over eight Swedish general elections where parties were more or less clear about their intentions to collaborate with other parties. Combining unique data from parties’ election manifestos including negative and positive quotes about other parties with polling trends and voters’ approval rating of parties, the analysis lends support to the idea that this type of coalition-oriented compensational voting occurs.

Where they sing solo: Accounting for cross-cultural variation in collective music-making in theories of music evolution.

Collective, synchronous music-making is far from ubiquitous across traditional, small-scale societies. We describe societies that lack collective music and offer hypotheses to help explain this cultural variation. Without identifying the factors that explain variation in collective music-making across these societies, theories of music evolution based on social bonding (Savage et al.) or coalition signaling (Mehr et al.) remain incomplete.

Mainstream Sell-Outs? How Collaboration with the Radical Right Changes Perceptions of Party Positions on Immigration

AbstractEuropean mainstream right parties are increasingly choosing to include radical right parties in coalition governments or other types of stable and committed cooperation. How does this cooperation affect voters’ perceptions of party positions? This article examines whether coalition signals have a significant impact on voters’ perceptions of the specific policy issues that were at stake in the bargaining process. More specifically, does the issue ownership of the radical right cause voters to perceive mainstream parties as radicalizing on immigration issues pertaining to asylum and multiculturalism? I compare the perceptions of Dutch parties before and after two coalition formations that (formally and informally) involved a radical right party: the coalition with the List Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and the support agreement with the Freedom Party in 2010. Furthermore, I examine the long-term effects of the Danish mainstream right government's reliance on the support of the radical right Danish People's Party in 2001–11.

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding.

Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, biology, musicology, psychology, and neuroscience into a unified framework that accounts for the biological and cultural evolution of music. We argue that the evolution of musicality involves gene-culture coevolution, through which proto-musical behaviors that initially arose and spread as cultural inventions had feedback effects on biological evolution because of their impact on social bonding. We emphasize the deep links between production, perception, prediction, and social reward arising from repetition, synchronization, and harmonization of rhythms and pitches, and summarize empirical evidence for these links at the levels of brain networks, physiological mechanisms, and behaviors across cultures and across species. Finally, we address potential criticisms and make testable predictions for future research, including neurobiological bases of musicality and relationships between human music, language, animal song, and other domains. The music and social bonding hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

How do coalition signals shape voting behavior? Revealing the mediating role of coalition expectations

Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems.

Opposition Coalition Signaling and Its Limits: Evidence from Survey Data in Malaysia

Existing analyses of opposition pre-electoral coalition formation in autocracies emphasize the precariousness of bargaining between opposition elites to nominate a single challenger against the dominant incumbent. This paper argues that how opposition parties coordinate to send anti-regime signals exhibiting their unity and ideological compromise is equally if not more important. These signals aim to encourage opposition voters to engage in strategic voting - persuade opposition voters to vote for candidates from candidates from other opposition parties that they may disdain, rather than for the incumbent autocrat. I provide evidence of strategic voting through two sets of survey data from Malaysia, one of the most robust electoral authoritarian regimes in the world. First, a survey experiment finds that a coalition common policy platform increases opposition voter support for candidates from coalition partners. This effect, however, is limited to moderate and politically knowledgeable voters. Second, I present evidence from the Asian Barometer survey demonstrating that opposition voters exhibit stronger commitments to anti-regime issues as compared to incumbent voters.

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

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.

Weighting Parties and Coalitions: How Coalition Signals Influence Voting Behavior

Democratic accountability is characterized as weak in parliamentary systems where voters cannot choose their government directly. We argue that coalition signals about desirable and undesirable coalitions that might be formed after the election help to provide this essential aspect of democratic government. We propose a simple model that identifies the effect of coalition signals on individual vote decisions. Based on survey experiments in two different countries we show how coalition signals change the relative weight of voters’ party and coalition considerations. Coalition signals increase the importance of coalition considerations and, at the same time, decrease the importance of party considerations in voters’ decision calculus, leading some voters to change their vote intention.

Opinion Polls, Coalition Signals and Strategic Voting: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Recent studies find that defection from one's most preferred party to some other party is as common under proportional representation (PR) as it is in plurality systems. It is less elaborated how election‐specific contextual factors affect strategic vote choice under PR. This study looks at the impact of two potentially important contextual factors: parties’ coalition signals about cooperation with other parties (referred to as ‘pre‐electoral coalitions’) and polling information, which vary from one election to the next. The focus is strategic voting for smaller parties at risk of falling below an electoral threshold. The hypothesis is that parties that are included in well‐defined coalitions will benefit from strategic ‘insurance’ votes if the polls show that they have support slightly below the threshold. However, smaller parties that do not belong to a coalition would be less likely to benefit from insurance votes. Extensive survey experiments with randomized coalition signals and polls give support to the idea that a voter's tendency to cast an insurance vote depends on whether the polls show support below or above the threshold and whether the party is included in a coalition or not.

What drives rental votes? How coalitions signals facilitate strategic coalition voting

Rental voting is a coalition voting strategy, by which supporters of a senior coalition partner cast their vote for the prospective junior coalition partner to secure its representation in parliament and, hence, the formation of this coalition. We make transparent that previous research has only studied rental-voting in contexts, in which coalition signals were consistent with the rental-vote logic. Employing a qualitative identification strategy, we find evidence for rental voting only in the context with consistent coalition signals. Moreover, respondents exposed to consistent coalition signals behave similarly to voters who most likely did not receive the inconsistent coalition signals they had been exposed to.

Guitar increases male facebook attractiveness: Preliminary support for the sexual selection theory of music

Music is a universal phenomenon that has genetic and brain-localized features. As such, it warrants adaptive evolutionary explanations. While some scholars believe that music arose as a by-product of other adaptations, others argue that music is likely to have served some adaptive function, for example in coalition signaling or mother-child bonding. The sexual selection theory of music suggests that music serves as a signal in mate selection. While this claim is prevalent, it lacks empirical evidence. A facebook experiment revealed that women replied more positively to friendship requests from a man shown in a photo holding a guitar. These results offer initial support for the sexual selection theory of music.

Polls, coalition signals and strategic voting: An experimental investigation of perceptions and effects

Polls and coalition signals can help strategic voters in multiparty systems with proportional representation and coalition governments to optimise their vote decision. Using a laboratory experiment embedded in two real election campaigns, this study focuses on voters' attention to and perception of polls and coalition signals. The manipulation of polls and coalition signals allows a causal test of their influence on strategic voting in a realistic environment. The findings suggest that active information acquisition to form fairly accurate perceptions of election outcomes can compensate for the advantage of high political sophistication. The theory of strategic voting is supported by the evidence, but only for a small number of voters. Most insincere vote decisions are explained by other factors. Thus, the common practice to consider all insincere voters as strategic is misleading.

Looking for Mr. Right? A Comparative Analysis of Parties’ ‘Coalition Statements’ prior to the Federal Elections of 2005 and 2009

Although literature on the topic of coalition formation has become nearly unmanageable and although parties' preferences are always at the centre of related theories, the preferences uttered by parties themselves (‘coalition signals’) have hardly played a role so far. A symptom of this neglect is the absence of a notional equivalent of the German ‘Koalitionsaussage’ in the English language. The recently introduced concept of ‘pre-electoral coalitions’ only seemingly offers a more precise description of the matter in question. The article explores the concept of coalition signals, offers a categorisation and discusses possible extensions. The effects of coalition signals on voter behaviour and party strategy are considered. This is followed by a comparison of the coalition signals given by German parties prior to the Bundestag elections 2005 and 2009. A new measure for the acceptance of different coalition alternatives in the electorate is suggested.

A Rational Calculus of Voting Considering Coalition Signals: The 2005 German Bundestag Election as an Example

This article extends the calculus of rational voting (Riker & Ordeshook, 1968) by considering the coalition building process and the legislative process (cf. Austen-Smith & Banks, 1988) in multi-party systems. Comparing preferences on coalitions and their resulting legislative outcomes instead of party preferences, I create preference profiles of voters on coalitions and estimate the probability that a coalition forms, given the parties' coalition signals, and an expected electoral result. I illustrate the results of this rational calculus for the German Bundestag elections 2005 as a political map. Furthermore, this calculus allows the identification of coalition signals which raise and reduce a party's vote share.

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system.

Evidence suggests that humans might have neurological specializations for music processing, but a compelling adaptationist account of music and dance is lacking. The sexual selection hypothesis cannot easily account for the widespread performance of music and dance in groups (especially synchronized performances), and the social bonding hypothesis has severe theoretical difficulties. Humans are unique among the primates in their ability to form cooperative alliances between groups in the absence of consanguineal ties. We propose that this unique form of social organization is predicated on music and dance. Music and dance may have evolved as a coalition signaling system that could, among other things, credibly communicate coalition quality, thus permitting meaningful cooperative relationships between groups. This capability may have evolved from coordinated territorial defense signals that are common in many social species, including chimpanzees. We present a study in which manipulation of music synchrony significantly altered subjects' perceptions of music quality, and in which subjects' perceptions of music quality were correlated with their perceptions of coalition quality, supporting our hypothesis. Our hypothesis also has implications for the evolution of psychological mechanisms underlying cultural production in other domains such as food preparation, clothing and body decoration, storytelling and ritual, and tools and other artifacts.