Coalition governments differ from single party governments in several ways, including in the ways in which they govern. Coalition governments may be better (or worse) than single party governments in keeping their promises, better (or worse) than single party governments at being responsive to public opinion or better (or worse) at being decisive. Citizens, then, can evaluate coalition governance according to a number of different criteria. It can be hard to properly evaluate citizen views on these attributes if, for example, a particular setting only has experience of one form of governance. Furthermore, without some capacity to incorporate changing context, it can be hard to disentangle whether evaluations of coalition governance reflect underlying predispositions over what voters value or, rather, reflect responses to lived experiences under single- versus multi-party governments. A new data set which pools responses from over 20 years of citizen responses helps to address these questions. This period in New Zealand’s political history is marked by alternation in forms of government (single- versus multi-party) which means that respondents have direct experience of different types of government and, also, means that we are able to examine responses to government alongside questions of more underlying predispositions. We find that, while voters do have preferred forms of government, that popular views do respond both systematically and significantly to the actual form of government itself.