'Not my Government!'

Author(s)
Carolina Plescia, Jakob-Moritz Eberl
Abstract

Processes of coalition government formation have recently become subject to increasing delay across Europe. There also appears to be a concurrent surge in the success of ‘populist’ challengers, who tend to reject key features intrinsic to pluralism such as elite bargaining and compromise. Against this background, this article investigates for the first time citizen preferences for which party should get the mandate to form the government and which parties should definitely be excluded from government formation. We focus specifically on the effect that political knowledge and populist attitudes have on citizen preferences for government formation. We find that both political knowledge and populist attitudes are essential in explaining voters’ willingness or unwillingness to accept the fundamental prerequisite of coalition bargaining and political compromise. These findings have important implications for our understanding of citizens’ attitudes and political representation.

Organisation(s)
Department of Government, Department of Communication
Journal
Party Politics
Volume
27
Pages
103-113
No. of pages
11
ISSN
1354-0688
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068819827513
Publication date
02-2019
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
506012 Political systems
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Sociology and Political Science
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/not-my-government(9c579a17-8825-4221-85b1-56a949c97161).html