Strange bedfellows: Coalition makeup and perceptions of democratic performance among electoral winners

• When voters have mixed evaluations of parties that make up a coalition government they experience “coalition ambivalence”.
• As the ideological dispersion of coalition partners increases, voters experience greater ambivalence toward the government.
• Increased ambivalence is associated with a decline in support for democracy and its processes.

We argue that the partisan makeup of governing coalitions affects perceptions of democratic performance among those who voted for a government party. We introduce ambivalence toward the governing parties as the mechanism that drives this relationship, and we argue that such ambivalence, which occurs when favorability ratings of the parties vary, will be more common where the parties are more ideologically diverse. After advancing our theory, we test our expectations with post-election survey data from several countries. Evidence demonstrates that coalition ambivalence is greater where governing parties are ideologically divergent, and, even when controlling for this ideological divergence, ambivalence leads to more negative perceptions of democratic performance, bringing the attitudes of electoral winners closer to those of individuals who did not vote for a party in government.