full title: Government alternation and proximity voting: How policy change opportunities shape electoral behavior 

Abstract: A landmark finding inrecent research on electoral behavior is that voters anticipate thepostelection bargaining process among potential members of the governingcoalition, and that these anticipated policy agreements inform their votechoice. In this paper, we qualify this finding by arguing, and then showingempirically, that when the expected policy change after the elections ismarginal or non-existent, we argue that, ceteris paribus, ‘simple’ proximityvoting should prevail. We test our argument by using two different butcomplementary research strategies applied to an individual-level data setconstructed from electoral surveys in 28 countries over a 20-year period, andtwo recent national surveys in which respondents were directly asked to predictthe potential coalition government after the elections. Both strategies providesupport for our hypothesis and have important implications for ourunderstanding of the consequences of government alternation on voting behaviorand political representation more broadly.