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Preference-driven selective exposure does not always have to reinforce existing party and issue preferences and lead to attitudinal polarization. Because voters and parties are unlikely to agree on all issue positions, preference-driven selective exposure at the information selection stage can expose voters to counterattitudinal information. When party and issue preferences clash, voters are forced to reconcile this mismatch. Instead of polarization, existing preferences can be weakened. We test these assumptions with data from an information board experiment conducted during two real election campaigns in Germany. Participants encountered information about 5 parties and 13 issues in the form of short headlines that could be selected for further reading. The results suggest that selective exposure for preferred parties and issues is prevalent and exposes voters to a mix of consonant and dissonant information, that most voters require additional cognitive resources to process dissonant, counterattitudinal information, and that issue position congruency of participants and parties affects the extremity of party evaluations and the confidence in vote decisions. In short, selective exposure does not always lead to attitudinal reinforcement and polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coalition signals can offer crucial information to voters during political campaigns. In multiparty systems, they reduce the number of theoretically possible coalitions to a much smaller set of plausible and likely coalitions. Strategic voters who care more about the formation of the next coalition government than supporting the preferred party might, for example, defect from the preferred party in favor of another party that might produce a more desirable coalition government. For other voters, coalition signals might merely elicit affective responses which can shift the vote. In this study, we investigate whether and how different coalition signals affect vote intentions and activate different party and coalition preferences. We report the results of a nationally representative survey experiment conducted before the 2006 Austrian General Election. Respondents encountered four vignettes with hypothetical coalitions, each followed by the standard vote intention question. The results indicate that voters are responsive to coalition signals, and especially voters with two preferred parties tend to change their vote intentions. Finally, a more detailed look at Green Party voters suggests that individual party and coalition preferences help to explain the direction of these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, we investigate the effect of coalition preferences and expectations on vote decisions, above and beyond the preferences for specific parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the effect of coalition preferences and expectations on vote decisions, above and beyond the preferences for specific parties. It assesses the extent to which political preferences shape voters expectations about likely coalitions while differentiating between coalition preferences, assessments of electoral strength, and assessments of how likely it is that two or more parties will agree to form a coalition. It cites several subgroups of voters for whom coalition preferences and expectations could or should have made a difference.

Coalition governments are the norm in many countries, even though voters can only cast theirvote for an individual party, not a specific coalition. Some voters might nevertheless cast theirvote in a way that maximizes the probability that a preferred coalition will be formed after theelection. In the paper, we investigate the effect of coalition preferences and expectations on votedecisions, above and beyond the preferences for specific parties. We focus in particular onvoters' ability to form differentiated expectations about possible coalitions, the likelihood of amajority and the likelihood that the parties will be able to agree on a coalition. We report theresults of a nationally representative survey conducted before the 2006 Austrian GeneralElection. We collected detailed information about respondents' party and coalition preferencesand expectations about the electoral outcomes. Green Party voters are used to demonstrate thatthe effect of coalition preferences depends on whether or not voters expect a coalition to succeed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]