The Electoral Cost of Coalition Compromise: How Not Controlling the Portfolios You Care about Leads to Electoral Defeat

Coalition governments require that electoral competitors put aside policy differences to form a functioning government. As a symbol of the policies and benefits parties receive in turn for coalition participation, voters can use the ministries or portfolios parties control to evaluate the parties’ policy success within the coalition. Parties not controlling the portfolios on issues important in their election campaigns signal their failure to achieve these goals. Following this perspective, we hypothesize that the difference between the portfolios parties say they want and those that they get predict the extent of the cost of coalition participation, particularly for junior coalition partners. We examine propositions from this approach by combining data on coalition participation, portfolio allocation and parties’ issue positions to predict parties’ electoral success. Greater asymmetry in the issues that parties campaign on and the portfolios they receive increases the party’s electoral success. The results hold broad implications for studies of coalition participation and voter perceptions as well as scholars’ understanding of the broad mechanisms through which voters hold parties accountable for their campaign promises.