The Way we Were: How Histories of Co-Governance Alleviate Partisan Hostility

• Author: Will Horne,James Adams,Noam Gidron
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221100197
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(3) 299–325

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221100197

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The Way we Were:

How Histories of

Co-Governance Alleviate

Partisan Hostility

Will Horne

1

, James Adams

2

, and Noam Gidron

3



Abstract

Comparative politics scholars argue that consensual democratic institutions

encourage power-sharing that promotes “kinder, gentler”politics. We un-

cover one reason why this is the case: elite inter-party cooperation in

consensual systems is associated with reduced inter-party hostility in the mass

public. This is because governing parties’supporters feel much more warmly

toward their coalition partner(s) than we can explain based on policy

agreement alone. Moreover, these warm affective evaluations linger long after

the coalition itself has dissolved. We substantiate our arguments via analyses

of CSES survey data from 19 Western democracies between 1996 and 2017,

showing that current and past co-governance is associated with substantially

warmer inter-party affective evaluations. This implies that electoral systems

which encourage coalition governance may defuse partisan hostility.

Keywords

elections, public opinion, voting behavior, political parties, representation,

electoral systems

1

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

2

UC Davis, Davis, USA

3

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

Corresponding Author:

Will Horne, Princeton University, 1 Fisher Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.

Email: rhorne@princeton.edu

Concerns over resentment and dislike across party lines have become

ubiquitous in Western democracies. The potential negative implications of

partisan hostility were exposed in the United States during the divisive 2020

election campaign and the subsequent violent insurrection at the US Capitol—

and more broadly with democratic backsliding (Orhan, 2021). It is no surprise

that in President Biden’s inauguration speech he implored Americans to

“show respect to one another”and reminded his nation that “politics need not

be a raging f‌ire destroying everything in its path.”

Scholars extensively analyze the causes and consequences of American

partisan resentment, distrust, and dislike, commonly labeled affective po-

larization (Iyengar et al., 2019;Lelkes, 2018). Increasingly, this phenomenon

is also studied comparatively (Harteveld 2021a,2021b;Reiljan, 2020;

Wagner, 2021). Perhaps surprisingly for those concerned with Americans’

partisan resentment, comparative research suggests that the American public

is not an outlier in the intensity of its affective polarization (Lauka et al., 2018;

Wagner, 2021). And while American research emphasizes the psychological

mechanisms driving partisan resentment (Levendusky, 2018), comparative

scholarship extends this discussion to analyze its structural underpinnings

(Gidron et al., 2020;Reiljan, 2020).

Electoral institutions stand out as one structural feature closely associated

with mass publics’emotional political climates. In a foundational work of

comparative institutionalism, Lijphart (2012) argues that proportional rep-

resentation voting systems, and the coalition governments these systems

encourage, prompt kinder, gentler, politics. Toenact poli cy,and even to form a

government, political elites representing different groups must cooperate and

share power. Recent work suggests an important role for electoral systems in

structuring how voters think about politics. In an experimental study

leveraging multiple election studies and a survey experiment, Bassan-Nygate

and Weiss (2021) f‌ind that while heightened electoral competition stokes

partisan hostility, cooperation between parties promotes tolerance across party

lines. Fischer et al. (2021) use a clever experimental design to show that

voters, even those whose side loses in an election, are less negative toward the

other side under a proportional electoral system. Focusing on the other side of

the institutional spectrum, Drutman (2020) argues that two-party, winner-

take-all electoral systems—which often concentrate power in the hands of a

single party—incite more confrontational and emotionally charged party

competition than proportional systems. Taylor et al. (2014) point to the

strictness of the two-party system in the United States as a factor contributing

to gridlock and heightened polarization.

We build on these important contributions and investigate one mechanism

connecting electoral systems to variations in partisan resentment in mass

publics: that of governing coalitions between parties. We argue, f‌irst, that

citizens feel more warmly toward parties that co-govern with their preferred

300 Comparative Political Studies 56(3)