[fvc-wat-announce] Awesome new research on how PR / coalitions reduce polarization

[Dave Arthur]

This is more great support for PR that we all believe to be true and this is more evidence.
Dave A

From: Anita Nickerson
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2022 5:46 PM
To: Chapters Google Group
Subject: Awesome new research on how PR / coalitions reduce polarization

Hey everyone! 

Having another one of those experiences where the things we say all time on webinars turn out to be proven true! :)

Lee Drutman (who runs Fix Our House, the US campaign for PR) tweeted brand new research today. Thanks Gisela for spotting it!

You probably remember the research from NZ about two years ago showing that within the legislature, PR had increased civility between MPs whose parties are coalition partners or potential partners - a decrease in hostile words used in speeches since PR was adopted. 

Now research is showing PR coalitions affect the public who have a partisan preference in a similar way. They looked at 19 western democracies between 1996-2017, analyzing 76,187 partisan respondents’ feeling thermometer ratings of 148 distinct political parties.

See below - they found that basically people felt less hostile / more warm and fuzzy towards any parties that had been in a coalition with their preferred party anytime over the previous 15 years. 

Even if the parties that had been in coalition together stood for very different things. 
This is the "kinder, gentler democracy" Arend Lijphart was talking about. We sure do need that now. Highlights below mine.:)

Anita

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/gidron/files/horne_et_al._2022_cps.pdf

Discussion 

Our findings extend a growing literature on the relationship between electoral institutions and the social relations in society. Understanding how institutions shape cross-party resentment and hostility is important, particularly for those interested in electoral system reforms such as the ones gaining momentum in the United States. We argue and empirically show that partisans of currently co-governing parties evaluate each other far more warmly than we would expect based on ideology alone. Then, we show that this affective evaluation bonus extends to parties with past histories of co-governance. Our analyses of 77 CSES election surveys in 19 western publics between 1996-2017 substantiate that coalitions are strongly linked with partisan affective evaluations: partisans of governing parties award a large ‘affective bonus’ to their current coalition partners, beyond that predicted by ideological/policy proximity and the out-party’s radical right status. Equally important, partisans award substantial affective bonuses to previous coalition partners for up to 15 years after the coalition has expired. Coalition arrangements – both past and present – shape the intensity of out-party dislike across western publics. 

Our arguments and empirical findings highlight one important (although not necessarily exclusive) mechanism behind Lijphart’s (2012) contention that proportional voting systems promote ‘kinder, gentler’ politics. Our cross-national comparisons substantiate that more proportional systems display much denser networks of (current and past) co-governance than do disproportional systems, and that proportionality is associated with warmer aggregate levels of out-party evaluations across western publics. Our findings suggest that these two patterns are linked, as proportional representation creates party systems with rich coalition histories, which in turn prompt the warmer cross-party evaluations we observe in more proportional systems. This supports Americanists’ arguments about the benefits of a move towards a more proportional electoral system (Drutman 2020, Rodden 2019). Our findings also speak to implications of the United States (or states and cities within it) moving away from its strict two-party system (Santucci 2020). 

Our findings also point to how power alternation can warm the political environment in the mass public. Developing a party system with a dense historical network of party co-governance depends not only on the emergence of coalition cabinets per se, but of alternating cabinets over time featuring a diversity of differing coalition arrangements: the greater the variety of the cabinets in a country’s political history, the denser the network of co-governing relationships. In this regard, the phenomenon of ‘Grand Coalitions’ of parties that span the policy divide, such as the German Christian Democrat-Social Democratic cabinet that was in place for much of the past fifteen years, can be expected to warm the political atmosphere: these coalitions create a history of co-governance between parties that do not usually cogovern, and because they typically feature two large parties – one from the left, one from the right – this cabinet history warms the cross-party relationships for a large share of the country’s partisans. 
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