In the United States, the process of allocating executive power after an election is usually straightforward -- the candidate with the most votes wins. However, this in not the case in parliamentary democracies that do not produce usually a majority of legislative seats for a single party (so-called coalitional systems). In these systems, a period of inter-party negotiations follows each election. This negotiation determines who becomes the prime minister and what other parties have a share of executive power. Little is know about ho voters manage the greater complexity of these systems. Do they simply vote for the party that they most prefer, or are their voting strategies more complex? Do they worry about wasting their vote on a party that has little change of getting into the cabinet? Do they even know whether different parties are more or less likely to get into the cabinet? Most previous work ignores these questions and simply assumes that the post-election bargaining over cabinets is simply too complex for voters to understand, and, thus, has little impact on how they vote. In this project, the investigator uses national election surveys to ask voters in coalitional systems questions that reveal what they understand and do not understand about the coalition-formation process and its results. This inquiry is motivated by a specific theoretical model (developed in Stevenson, 1997) that suggests that voters are actually quite capable of making sense of coalitional systems and using this understanding to modify the way that they vote (that is, to use their vote to try to affect who gets into the cabinet). They gain this understanding, not through knowledge of the details of the coalition-formation process, but by relying on informational shortcuts in the form of empirical regularities that tend to characterize the output of this process in their countries. For example, although voters in a country may not know the rules that govern how proposals for different governing coalitions are put forward, they may know that the largest party in the legislature normally holds the position of prime minister. Stevenson's theoretical model simply suggests that this kind of information is useful to voters and (along with some other empirical regularities) allows them to cast rationally votes that are intended to affect the composition of the cabinet. These theoretical claims, of course, depend on the idea that voters actually perceive the empirical regularities that researchers can identify about the system (for example, that the largest party holds the prime ministership, or that the prime minister tends to pick ideologically compatible parties as partners). However, it is not necessarily the case that this is true. Voters may be ignorant of these simple facts. The survey instrument that the investigator uses in this project helps to settle this question by revealing whether voters: 1) perceive the simple empirical regularities that characterize coalition formation in their countries, and 2) whether they use these regularities to structure their expectations about the likely results of the coalition-formation process. If the answer to these questions is positive, then researchers can have more confidence in the specific theoretical model of voting in coalitional systems put forward by the investigator. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, such a result can revise the common view that, in coalitional systems, the process of coalition formation is too complicated to affect how individuals vote.
