Bewertung möglicher Regierungen oder Spiegel des politischen Wettbewerbs? Determinanten der Koalitionspräferenzen der Wähler in den Bundesländern von 1990 bis 2009

Coalition governments are the norm in the German multilevel-system. Their existence not only affects the political process and policy-making, but also increases the complexity of voting: The behaviour of voters at the polls is not only based on the evaluation of the parties, but also influenced by their opinion on the coalitions that the parties could form after the election. But we still know little about the determinants of voters' coalition preferences. In this paper, we combine theories of voting behaviour, government formation and policy learning to derive expectations regarding factors that may impact voters’ coalition preferences. For example, we expect that voters prefer coalitions that are most likely to implement their policy preferences. At the same time, we assume that voters adopt the patterns of party competition and anticipate how realistic individual coalitions are – given the existing patterns of government formation. We test our hypotheses by analysing survey data from 78 election studies from the German state level. The results support our arguments: the coalition preferences of voters depend not only on the programmatic proximity of potential coalitions, the parties’ coalition statements and party identification, but also on the characteristics of coalitions that were formed in the past.