PE/PI Workshop: Georg Vanberg (Duke)

Georg Vanberg will present his talk, "Voters and Coalitions: Ideological Awareness and Government Formation in Multiparty Democracies."

The key argument we make is that the literature on coalition formation has largely focused on elite bargaining without paying sufficient attention to the fact that elites bargain in front of an audience of voters who evaluate and react to coalition bargains. Thus, we start with voters. In particular, we examine how the ideological awareness of voters conditions their perceptions and evaluations of coalition bargains, demonstrate that parties systematically draw on support of voter groups that differ in their level of ideological awareness, and show that this has significant implications for the kinds of governments that emerge.