Abstract

“Previous research confirms that candidates’ behavior in-between elections plays an important role in voters’ calculus. Yet, there is almost no such literature on the effects of party behavior outside of the electoral arena. I address this gap by contributing to the academic debate on the increasingly blurred distinction between government and opposition parties in policymaking and the procedural running of parliament. I use a conjoint survey experiment to test whether voters prefer parties that present a distinct profile in parliament or cooperate ‘across the aisle’ by supporting either government or opposition policy proposals. I hypothesize that the relationship between parliamentary distinctiveness and electoral behavior is curvilinear: moderate levels of distinctiveness between government and opposition parties are positively, but low and high levels are negatively related to the probability of voting for a party. I also suggest that party appeal is moderated by its level of pledge fulfillment, size, and ideological proximity to respondents and the government (or governing coalition). In this talk I present my experimental design and the results of the pilot conducted in four institutionally diverse countries: Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The findings from the final research are important for our understanding of how voters perceive their choice and the credibility of the opposition in established representative democracies.”

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