Voters, Responsibility Attribution and Support Parties in Parliamentary Democracies

Minority governments must, by definition, rely on the support of parties that are not part of the government to form the legislative majorities needed to stay in office and pass legislation. Further, while the composition of these majority coalitions may certainly shift from vote to vote, many minority cabinets rely on support from a stable set of parties (‘support parties’ from here on) that have publicly committed to side with the government on votes of confidence and other major pieces of legislation. Such ‘minority cabinets with outside support’ are relatively common among Western democracies. For example, Powell finds that of the 373 cabinets formed from 1946 to 2013 in twenty Western democracies, 104 (28 per cent) were minority cabinets – thirty-six of which (35 per cent) relied on ‘formal support parties’.Despite the importance of support parties to the formation and continued governance of many minority cabinets, political scientists know very little about how voters perceive such parties, or how they weigh their influence in the policy-making process. Do voters discount the influence of these parties because they lack a cabinet seat, or do voters recognize the pivotal position such parties play in supporting the cabinet and thus infer greater policy-making influence relative to other opposition parties? Existing empirical studies of performance voting have all classified support parties as members of the opposition – implicitly assuming that voters do not punish or reward them for government performance. This assumption also underlies Strøm’s theoretical argument that many minority governments form because some potential cabinet partners anticipate that they will be punished electorally if they formally join the government. Clearly, Strøm’s argument relies on a strong assumption about how voters treat support parties – essentially arguing that these parties can ‘have their cake and eat it too’. Or, put differently, they can influence policy from outside the cabinet, but avoid electoral responsibility. To our knowledge this foundational assumption has never been tested. Further, recent work on voters’ attributions of policy-making responsibility in complex multiparty systems provides a theoretical rationale for this model of voter behavior. Duch, Przepiorka and Stevenson show that individuals use proposal power as a simple but powerful cue for attributing policy-making responsibility for collective decisions, and Duch and Stevenson show that voters