Congruence Between Regional and National Elections

Abstract

The number of regional elections and what is at stake at these elections have increased considerably over the past decades. Yet the interpretation of regional election results lags behind, in particular explanations for when and how regional election results deviate from national election results. This article conceptualizes congruence of the vote in three different ways that make it possible to assess the contribution of three competing theoretical approaches in explaining variation in dissimilarity between vote shares across space and time. These approaches are second-order election theory, regional authority and territorial cleavages. The hypotheses are tested against a data set containing the results of more than 4,000 regional and national elections held in 360 regions in 18 countries. It appears that the depth of territorial cleavages explains variation across space, but to understand change over time one needs to consider institutional authority and second-order election effects.

Federalism, multi-level elections and social policy in Brazil and India

“…The Temer administration has hinted that Bolsa Família includes too many people and should be temporary, even though in its early days it promised to preserve the programme, for fear of the electoral consequences of not doing so. The Temer government also passed a controversial constitutional amendment that froze government spending in real terms for 20 years, and this has already begun to squeeze spending on social programmes (Sátyro 2017). While consensus in Congress in favour of social inclusion is still robust, as detailed by Pereira and Bertholini in this issue, that belief is combined with an opposition to tax increases.…”

Nationalisation of regional elections in Central and Eastern Europe

“…The scores for the region data-set are derived by summing the party vote shares involved in an alliance strategy for each regional election. Due to operationalisation of the congruence measures, larger regions will have lower dissimilarity scores because their share into the overall national election result is larger (Schakel 2013b). Similarly, larger parties tend to lose more vote share which leads to higher dissimilarity (Caramani 2004).…”

“…The regional election is compared with the national election and, at the same time, the national electorate is compared with the regional electorate. In order to tease out the two sources of variation, one needs to consider two other dissimilarity indices (Schakel 2013b). Electorate congruence (NN-NR) keeps the type of election constant and evaluates the extent to which regional electorates vote differently.…”

“…Five approaches to study the territoriality of the regional vote Studies on nationalisation of regional electoral behaviour in Western Europe is often approached from three theoretical perspectives (Jeffery and Hough 2009;Schakel 2013b). The first approach concerns the second-order election model which emphasises the subordination of regional elections to first-order, national elections (Reif and Schmitt 1980).…”

Fiscal equalization schemes and subcentral government borrowing

“…Consequently, another control variable was added, taking a value equal to 1 when the regional election year coincides with a general election year, and zero otherwise. For both election variables, data provided by Schakel (2011) were used. Finally, the amount of grants received during the period (t-1) was also controlled for, which may affect the amount of revenues expected by the region in period (t).…”