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"The ailing Liberal Democrats limped into their 2011 annual conference needing to discuss a new strategy. In the year and half since joining the Conservatives in Britain's first formal coalition government since the second World War their popularity had been halved and it was time for a change. Clegg and the Liberal Democrats had spent the last year learning what many of their continental counterparts have long known: cooperation with one's coalition partners is vital to the cabinet's ability to govern effectively, but this cooperation may often come at the cost of electoral capital. Votes are won on the promise of pursuing a core set of policies, not on the promise of cooperation with some (often as yet unnamed) partners in coalition. Voters choose parties, at least in part, with the understanding that they will adhere to these campaign promises. And, should those parties appear to shirk their charge - to trade away or otherwise undermine their stated policy goals in a series of bargains or log rolls with their coalition partners - their supporters will likely interpret these actions as evidence that the party had misrepresented its goals, that its goals have evolved, or, more immediately worrisome, as evidence of manifest incompetence"--

Multiparty governance requires compromise and this compromise can
lead to electoral losses. I argue that coalition members are
motivated to differentiate themselves from their cabinet partners to
mitigate potential electoral losses resulting from voters perceiving
them as not rigorously pursuing their core policy positions or not
possessing strong policy stands. I test this argument with original
data on the scrutiny of over 2,200 government bills gathered from
three parliamentary democracies incorporating information on voter
perceptions of partisan ideology and parties' policy preferences as
derived from their manifestos. I find that coalition partners that
are perceived as more similar will amend one another's legislative
proposals more vigorously in an effort to differentiate in the eyes
of the electorate—to protect their brand—and therefore provide
evidence for "pure" vote-seeking behavior in the legislative review
process. Furthermore, these original data provide answers to several
open questions regarding the policy motivations of cabinet parties
in legislative review and the role of committee chairs and external
support parties on policy outcomes.

Coalition governance requires parties to come to collective policy decisions while simultaneously competing for votes. This reality has inspired a vibrant literature on coalition policy making, which is focused on legislative organization and behavior, though it is not clear how it affects the electorate. This article addresses this gap in the literature by examining how voters' perceptions of compromise in coalition policy making affect their vote choices. Analyzing data from six parliamentary democracies where multiparty governance is the norm, it finds that voters punish parties they view as compromising. More specifically, voters are found to discount the policy accomplishments and policy promises of compromising parties, and that this tendency is more pronounced among previous incumbent cabinet supporters and the politically disinterested. These findings have important implications for the study of voting as well as coalition policy making.

ObjectiveLaws reducing hurdles to legally carrying concealed firearms are argued to have a deterrent effect on crime by increasing its perceived costs. This argument rests on the assumption that these policies will either directly or indirectly increase the perceived distribution of firearm carriers, an assumption that is as yet untested. This article tests this assumption and, in so doing, suggests testing the necessary conditions of policy can be useful when assessing outcomes is difficult.MethodsI collect survey data on the perceived number of firearm carriers across the United States and then use a hierarchical regression model to assess the impact of concealed carry policies on these perceptions, controlling for several contextual and individual‐level factors.ResultsThe data suggest that there is no statistically discernible relationship between concealed carry policies and the public's perceptions of the number of firearm carriers. Indeed, the data suggest that the perceived density of firearm carriers is similarly uncorrelated to the number of active concealed carriers.ConclusionThe link between concealed carry policy and people's beliefs about the number of firearm carriers in their community is unidentifiable in the data. The rationale for concealed carry deterrence, however, depends on such a link existing: it assumes that potential assailants are aware of the distribution of firearm carriers in the potential victim population, but the empirical evidence presented here suggests that that assumption simply does not hold. Because beliefs over the distribution of firearm carriers are impervious to permitting policies and do not respond positively to the true distribution of carriers, the data suggest easing concealed carry cannot deter crime.

Government durability is critically important, yet the supply of research devoted to its causes far exceeds the supply of research devoted to its consequences. We argue that short government durations in parliamentary democracies increase public spending by driving a political budget cycle. We present a revision of the standard political budget cycle model that relaxes the common (often implicit) assumption that election timing is fixed and known in advance. Instead, we allow cabinets to form expectations about their durability and use these expectations to inform their spending choices. The model predicts that 1) cabinets should spend more as their expected term in office draws to a close and 2) cabinets that outlive their expected duration should run higher deficits. Using data from 15 European democracies over several decades, we show that governments increase spending as their expected duration withers and run higher deficits as they surpass their forecasted life expectancy.

We present a parsimonious framework for understanding contextual variation in legislative nonresponse. We argue that legislators' propensity to vote is a function of their willingness and ability to be physically present in the chamber and determine the best position to take on a given proposal. From this framework, we derive four hypotheses regarding the compensation legislators receive, their opportunity to pursue work outside of the chamber, and their informational resources. Analyzing data on over seven million voting opportunities across two sessions in ninety-nine chambers, we find robust evidence that longer legislative sessions decrease nonresponse and that informational resources increase nonresponse, but no evidence that compensation influences nonresponse.

AbstractRecent studies document that voters infer parties' left‐right policy agreement based on governing coalition arrangements. This article extends this research to present theoretical and empirical evidence that European citizens update their perceptions of junior coalition partners' left‐right policies to reflect the policies of the prime minister's party, but that citizens do not reciprocally project junior coalition partners' policies onto the prime minister's party. These findings illuminate the simple rules that citizens employ to infer parties' policy positions, broaden understanding of how citizens perceive coalition governance and imply that 'niche' parties, whose electoral appeal depends upon maintaining a distinctive policy profile, assume electoral risks when they enter government.