You Don’t Always Get What You Want. How Government Formation Influences Citizens’ Attitudes Towards Politics

In parliamentary regimes coalition governments are the norm. Here, back-room negotiations rather than elections are the decisive arena of government composition, making citizens more likely to feel that they cannot control government formation. At the same time, the process of government formation provides substantial information to citizens about the willingness of their representatives to compromise on election promises in order to obtain political office. As such, government formation has substantial potential to influence how citizens evaluate the quality of the democratic system. Our knowledge of how coalition formation affects citizens attitudes towards the democratic system is limited. This is due to the lack of panel public opinion surveys following elections with waves both before and after the government formation process. In this paper, we analyze a novel three-wave panel data survey of Dutch citizens before and after the 2023 lower house election and following the subsequent government formation. Drawing on these data, we examine how a number of different attitudes (trust in government, political cynicism, political efficacy and acceptance of compromise) change after elections and after coalition formation. We further analyze how citizens’ preferences and expectations about coalition formation mediate changes in the attitudes analyzed.