What Do Voters Know about Cabinet Formation?

在美国，选举后分配行政权力的过程通常很简单--得票最多的候选人获胜。然而，情况并非如此，在议会民主政体中，通常不会为一个政党产生多数立法席位(所谓的联合制)。在这些制度中，每次选举之后都会有一段时间的党际谈判。这一谈判决定了谁将成为总理，以及哪些其他政党拥有行政权力。对于选民如何管理这些更复杂的系统，人们知之甚少。他们只是简单地投票给他们最喜欢的政党，还是他们的投票策略更加复杂？他们担心把选票浪费在一个几乎没有机会进入内阁的政党身上吗？他们甚至知道不同的政党进入内阁的可能性是大还是小？大多数以前的研究忽略了这些问题，只是简单地假设选举后关于内阁的讨价还价太复杂了，选民无法理解，因此对他们如何投票几乎没有影响。在这个项目中，调查员使用全国选举调查向联盟系统中的选民提出问题，揭示他们对联盟组建过程及其结果的理解和不理解。这项调查是由一个特定的理论模型(史蒂文森，1997年开发的)推动的，该模型表明，选民实际上非常有能力理解联盟制度，并利用这种理解来改变他们投票的方式(即，利用他们的选票试图影响谁进入内阁)。他们不是通过了解联盟组建过程的细节，而是依靠经验规则形式的信息捷径来获得这种理解，这些规则往往是这一进程在其国家的产出的特征。例如，尽管一个国家的选民可能不知道如何提出不同执政联盟提案的规则，但他们可能知道，立法机构中最大的政党通常担任总理一职。史蒂文森的理论模型只是表明，这类信息对选民是有用的，并(与其他一些经验规则一起)允许他们理性地投票，目的是影响内阁的组成。当然，这些理论主张取决于这样一种观点，即选民实际上感知到了研究人员可以确定的关于这一制度的经验规律(例如，最大的政党拥有首相职位，或者首相倾向于选择意识形态上相容的政党作为合作伙伴)。然而，情况并不一定是这样的。选民可能对这些简单的事实一无所知。调查人员在本项目中使用的调查工具通过揭示选民是否：1)感知到他们国家联盟形成的简单经验规则，以及2)他们是否利用这些规则来构建他们对联盟形成过程可能结果的预期，来帮助解决这个问题。如果这些问题的答案是肯定的，那么研究人员就可以对研究人员提出的联盟系统投票的具体理论模型更有信心。此外，或许更重要的是，这样的结果可能会修正普遍的观点，即在联盟系统中，联盟的形成过程过于复杂，无法影响个人的投票方式。

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.