The Red‐Blue Heuristics: How Citizens Manage Institutionalized Coalition Politics

ABSTRACT

Coalition politics represents a challenge to democratic citizens: they need to consider which governing coalitions a party is willing to enter or support in order to make informed vote choices. Following a minimalist perspective, several scholars have suggested that citizens rely on universal heuristics , such as left‐right placement, when navigating coalition politics. However, coalition politics is often presented to citizens by politicians and media in a simplified form specific to the institutions and traditions of their countries. We propose that this allows for institutional heuristics , which are both cheaper and more accurate. We illustrate our theory using public opinion data from Denmark (2021−2024), where the division of parties into red and blue blocs is a defining feature of coalition politics. We find that knowledge about which party belongs to which bloc, allows citizens to successfully perform the three central tasks that the political system presents them with: (1) Mastering the terminology of coalition politics, (2) knowing which parties to hold accountable, and (3) understanding the coalition implications of voting.