An attentive audience? If and how voters evaluate coalition formation

Coalition governments have traditionally been criticized for creating low clarity of responsibility and thus impairing voters’ ability to hold representatives accountable. Recent scholarship has suggested that voters are actually evaluating the coalition behavior of individual parties—not only at the end of the government period but also at the government formation stage. The answers to an open-ended question included in the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) in 2020, provide unique insights into the considerations that voters have when evaluating the formation of a government coalition. We find that these considerations include expected policy output, but also other aspects such as ideology, portfolio allocation, and fairness of payoffs etc. When exploring the topic of portfolio allocation in depth, we find that both quantitative and qualitative considerations play a role. Furthermore, we explore whether the extent to which voters think about and rationalize their satisfaction with the coalition formation, and the specific type of considerations that voters have in mind, depend on individual-level characteristics such as satisfaction with the outcome, political sophistication and partisanship.