Collective Decision-Making and the Economic Vote

Experimental evidence suggests that decision makers with proposal power are held responsible for collective decisions. In the case of coalition governments, voter heuristics assign responsibility for economic outcomes to individual parties, directing the economic vote toward the Prime Minister party. Using extensive survey data from 1988 to 2010 in 28 democracies, we demonstrate that voters also identify the Finance Minister party as responsible depending on whether the coalition context exaggerates or mutes its perceived agenda power. When parties take ownership for particular policy areas, and decision-making is compartmentalized, voters perceive the Finance Minister as having proposal power and it receives a larger economic vote. Online survey experiments in Ireland and the Netherlands confirm that subjects employ compartmentalization signals to identify, and punish, coalition parties with proposal power.