Time:               June 1st, 11:30 a.m.

Speaker:          Christoffer Green-Pedersen (Aarhus University)

Place:               Seminarraum 8, Kolingasse 14-16, 1090 Vienna

Coalition Voting in Comparative Perspective: Under What Circumstance do Voters take Coalitions into Account? 

Coalition politics in Western Europe is institutionalized in different ways. In some countries, citizens face relatively fixed bloc alternatives, while in others, political parties say little about potential coalitions during election campaigns, leaving such decisions to post-election negotiations. How does this variation in institutional context affect coalition-directed voting? We hypothesize that the more the institutional context surrounding an election reduces uncertainty about coalition politics, the more efficacious citizens will feel in this domain—and the more likely they are to engage in coalition-directed voting. We test this idea using survey data from four recent elections in Ireland, Germany, Norway, and the Netherlands.

Christoffer Green-Pedersen is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. His research focuses on how parties compete, in particular in terms of setting the issue agenda and how this competition affects political decision making on issues like immigration, welfare-state reforms and euthanasia. He has also studied how the mass media influence party competition.
His focus is on Denmark in a comparative perspective, and he has in particular on the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland. His latest project investigates how voters view cooperation and coalition building amongst political parties.