In April 2015, six months before the upcoming Canadian parliamentary elections, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party and the incumbent Conservatives were neck and neck in the opinion polls, with the New Democratic Party polling as the third party. The only feasible option to remove the Conservative government from office at the time seemed to be a coalition government of the Liberals and New Democrats. Yet, on April 14, Trudeau came out and said: "The fact is, I’m opposed to coalitions." In the end, he was able to form a single-party majority government following the 2015 election. Still, the question many pundits asked at the time was why exactly he was so against a coalition government, which seemed like the only potential option to remove the Conservative Party from office. David Fortunato provides us with a convincing answer for Trudeau’s behavior: Coalitions are risky; voters dislike compromise; collective cabinet responsibility makes it hard to show the differences between partners; and if they fail to show how they are different from their partners to voters, and if voters believe that the parties are failing to follow through on their campaign promises due to their compromising behavior, then they lose support.
Surprisingly, the literature on how coalitions and coalitional behavior affect public opinion and political behavior was largely untapped for a long time, despite the prevalence of coalitions across parliamentary democracies. While the questions of why certain coalitions form and how long they stay in office has received a great deal of attention, the voter-coalition connection was missing, save the seminal work of Lanny Martin and Georg Vanberg. Fortunato builds on Martin and Vanberg’s work and brings a breath of fresh air to this limited literature with a compelling argument about the problems of coalition compromise through cross-national analyses, survey experiments, and a case study of the United Kingdom’s unique coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
Fortunato’s cycle of coalitions theory has multiple parts that connect coalition parties’ behavior with voters’ perceptions and electoral behavior. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the voter level. First, Fortunato argues that voters do not like compromise and perceive compromising coalition parties as incompetent and acting against their brand. The survey experimental results from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in chapter 4 show that voters presented with compromising coalition parties are less likely to believe that the governing parties represent their supporters and more likely to think that the parties are ideologically similar. Fortunato then supplements these experimental results with panel data from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Sweden in chapter 5, demonstrating that perceived government compromise (i.e., reduced perceived distance between coalition partners) negatively affects incumbent electoral support.
Chapters 6–8, then, move the focus to party strategies: What should coalition partners do to mitigate these losses for perceived compromise, and do the strategies work? One crucial feature of coalition governments that artificially increases the compromising image of political parties is the collective cabinet responsibility, which stipulates that "all members of government are expected to support all government decisions and cloister any discord between member parties and individual ministers" (p. 93). Hence, the ability of coalition parties to go against their partners and show voters their uncompromising behavior is limited. Given the findings in chapters 4 and 5, we know that perceived compromise is risky. How, then, can political parties show their unique brands and competence as governing parties? Fortunato argues that the only legislative period when coalition parties can express their differences from their partners and save their brands is during the legislative review phase of the policy-making process, which kicks in when a policy proposal is submitted to the parliament and concludes with its final vote. Using an impressive dataset of legislative scrutiny of cabinet proposals in Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands over several decades, chapter 6 shows that the more similarly a pair of cabinet parties is perceived, the more they will amend the legislative proposals.
The findings of this chapter then lead to chapters 7 and 8, in which, with a case study of the United Kingdom’s 2010–15 coalition government and with a cross-national analysis of media-reported compromise and conflict, Fortunato shows when the strategy fails and works for electoral outcomes, respectively. Chapter 7 unpacks the UK Liberal Democrats’ behavior in the parliament through their legislative amendments and parliamentary speeches during the Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition government. Fortunato shows that the Liberal Democrats failed to differentiate themselves from the Conservatives, which he concludes is a potential reason why the Liberal Democrats suffered electorally in 2015. Chapter 8 then uses a dataset collected by Simon Weschle on the media reporting of coalition conflict and compromise across 13 countries between 2001 and 2014. The findings suggest that strategic differentiation of parties from their partners, as reported by the media, mitigates the electoral losses due to perceived compromise. Fortunato concludes the book with a "pushing forward" chapter, which provides exciting new avenues for coalitionary research. It is an important chapter for all interested in coalitionary politics and voter behavior.
The Cycle of Coalition is a must-read book connecting the institutions of coalition governments and parliaments with the perceptions and behavior of voters in parliamentary democracies. Fortunato skillfully takes the reader through tough questions to answer, and provides convincing and clear evidence using impressive data. Yet, some questions are still left open and await scholarly attention.
First, to keep the analyses simple, Fortunato misses an opportunity to differentiate between and theorize about the different parties of coalition governments. Are voters more likely to punish junior partners or the senior prime ministerial parties for their compromising behavior? Does it matter on which issues the compromise is perceived and which party owns the issue? In addition, related to the party strategies, which parties in the government should use the legislative period more strategically? Chapter 7 suggests that the junior coalition partner (in this case, Liberal Democrats) that fails to use the legislative scrutiny gets punished in elections. Is this a generalizable argument to all coalition partners? If so, why did the Conservatives win the majority in 2015 despite both parties’ lack of differentiating behavior?
Second, Fortunato assumes that all coalition partners are different and need to show their differences to protect their brand. However, a green and social-democratic coalition government differs from a social democratic and Christian democratic grand coalition in terms of the ideological distances between coalition partners. One may argue that voters do not need to see the differentiating behavior, and compromise might be less consequential for coalitions with ideologically similar political parties. Yet, one may also argue that ideologically different parties in a grand coalition do not need to work as hard to differentiate themselves given that voters likely already see them as diverse as possible.
None of these comments takes away from the critical contributions that The Cycle of Coalition makes, and all these questions should encourage other scholars to take the work presented here forward. I am confident that we will see more work connecting coalition behavior with public opinion soon, and the role of The Cycle of Coalition in this literature will be impressive.
