When Marriage Gets Hard: Intra-Coalition Conflict and Electoral Accountability

• Author: Sylvia Kritzinger,Carolina Plescia
• Published date: 01 January 2022
• Date: 01 January 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211024307
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2022, Vol. 55(1) 32–59

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024307

journals.sagepub.com/home/cps

When Marriage Gets

Hard: Intra-Coalition

Conflict and Electoral

Accountability

Carolina Plescia

1

and Sylvia Kritzinger

1



Abstract

Combining individual-level with event-level data across 25 European coun-

tries and three sets of European Election Studies, this study examines the

effect of conflict between parties in coalition government on electoral ac-

countability and responsibility attribution. We find that conflict increases

punishment for poor economic performance precisely because it helps clarify

to voters parties’actions and responsibilities while in office. The results

indicate that under conditions of conflict, the punishment is equal for all

coalition partners when they share responsibility for poor economic per-

formance. When there is no conflict within a government, the effect of poor

economic evaluations on vote choice is rather low, with slightly more

punishment targeted to the prime minister’s party. These findings have im-

portant implications for our understanding of electoral accountability and

political representation in coalition governments.

Keywords

retrospective voting, electoral accountability, intra-coalition conflict, coalition

governments

1

University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

Corresponding Author:

Sylvia Kritzinger, Department of Government, University of Vienna, Kolingasse 14-16, 1090

Vienna, Austria.

Email: sylvia.kritzinger@univie.ac.at

Competitive elections offer citizens the opportunity to hold the government

responsible for its past actions, with voters punishing incumbent parties for

poor performance while in office. For the retrospective voting mechanism to

work, however, voters need to be able to identify parties’achievements or

failures while in office (Manin et al., 1999). As discussed by Tavits (2007),if

lines of responsibility are not clear, the ability of voters to evaluate and punish

politicians declines.

The assignment of responsibility has been the subject of an extensive

literature, which shows that responsibility attribution is particularly prob-

lematic when the government is formed by a coalition of parties sharing power

during their term in office (Powell & Whitten, 1993). Under these circum-

stances, clarity of responsibility is obscured because voters are unsure about

who is responsible for policy making, and their ability to use the vote to

sanction politicians can be hampered (e.g., Anderson, 2000;Nadeau et al.,

2002;Whitten & Palmer, 1999).

Coalition governments, however, vary considerably, with some made up of

parties with similar policy goals, and others consisting of heterogeneous if not

litigious majorities (Strøm et al., 2008). Conflict within the government has

been found to have significant consequences for coalition management, policy

outputs, and government stability (e.g., Müller & Strøm, 2003). Yet, as of

today, the type of relation between coalition parties—conflictual versus

consensual—on the working of the accountability mechanism has not been

fully investigated. In this article, we argue and then show that the features of

the policy-making process in coalition governments are related to respon-

sibility attribution and clarity of responsibility, and thus retrospective voting.

Specifically, by connecting coalition politics with retrospective economic

voting, we test the argument that repeated conflictual behavior by coalition

parties provides important information on government parties’actions that

voters can use to assign responsibility for poor performance to the party in the

coalition mostly in charge of the economy.

To test our claim, we couple data from three European Election Studies

(EES) (2004, 2009, and 2014) with a novel measure of government conflict.

Our measure of intra-coalition conflict is based on the Integrated Crisis Early

Warning System (ICEWS) project (Boschee et al., 2013). The ICEWS

produces data on an almost continuous basis from media reports, press re-

leases, parliamentary speeches, and politicians’statements using machine

learning. The data document cooperative and conflictual public interactions

among politicians of government parties, and we rely on these data to create an

overall index of intra-coalition conflict that spans the entire legislative term.

Although the economy is not the only area to which electoral account-

ability should and seems to apply, for most voters the economy is among their

main priorities (Singer, 2011), and its valence character—the agreement on

policy outcomes—renders evaluations of the actual performance of the

Plescia and Kritzinger 33