André Blais, John H. Aldrich, Indridi H. Indridason and Renan Levine, "Do Voters Vote for Government Coalitions? Testing Downs' Pessimistic Conclusion," Party Politics, 12 (November, 2006), 691-705.

Third Paragraph from Start:
In this article, we demonstrate that some voters make up their mind on who to vote for not only on the basis of how they feel about the parties or the specific persons running as candidates, but also on the basis of how they feel about the potential coalitions that could form after the election. In other words, some voters vote for (or against) coalitions rather than for (or against) parties.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. Voting and preference
Table 2. Conditional logit: vote choice
Table 3. Voting and preference among coalition voters
Table 4. Determinants of coalition voting: a logit estimation democracy

First Paragraph of Conclusion:
This article has established that in the 2003 Israeli election, voters' views about the coalitions that could be formed after the election had an independent effect on vote choice, over and above their views about the parties, the leaders and their ideological orientations. We have estimated that for nearly one voter out of ten, coalition preferences were a decisive consideration, that is, that they induced the voter to support a party other than their most preferred one. For many others, undoubtedly, coalition considerations mattered, though they were not decisive in the strict sense defined here. Furthermore, voting for a coalition was not confined to the elite, as the least informed segment of the electorate was as prone to vote for a coalition as the most informed fragment. These results may not surprise scholars studying Israeli politics, but to the best of our knowledge this is the first systematic attempt at testing the effect of coalition considerations on vote choice.