Regional spillover into third‐order European elections

Abstract

Second‐order election research clearly reveals that national incumbency impacts on European election outcomes but despite the increasing importance of regions few studies explore the impact of regional politics. I theorize that governmental status at the regional level, regional authority, and the relative timing of the regional election affects vote share swings between European and previously held national elections. Based on an analysis including 12,545 vote share swings for 468 parties that compete elections held in 209 regions in 11 European Union member states since 1979, I find strong evidence for prospective regional voting, that is, voters rewarding parties in government at the regional level. First, parties that are in national opposition and in regional government incur larger vote share gains than parties that are in opposition at both levels. Second, these vote share gains become larger when regional authority increases and, third, when a regional election has preceded a European election.

The Political Costs of Austerity

“…This means that we focus on the following national elections: Austria: National Council (lower house); Germany: Bundestag (unicameral); Spain: Congress of Deputies (lower house); Finland: Eduskunta (unicameral); France: National Assembly (lower house); Italy: Chamber of Deputies (lower house); Portugal: Assembly of the Republic (unicameral); Sweden: Riksdag (unicameral). Data sources for Austria, France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden are Schakel (2013Schakel ( , 2021 and his project on Regional Elections. For the other countries we relied on national sources: Finland (Statistics Finland), Germany (Federal Returning Officers), and Portugal (Pordata).…”

Multi-level political change: Assessing electoral volatility in 58 European regions (1993-2022)

“…Dissimilarity has been mainly explained in structural terms by referring to the depth of relatively stable territorial cleavages underpinning the mobilization of regionalist and non-state-wide parties. Some authors have also tried to explain over-time electoral change in regional elections but have mainly concentrated on short-term swings and the presence of ‘second-order’ electoral effects (Schakel, 2011, 2021; Schakel and Jeffery, 2013). So far no study has systematically analysed longer-term change in regional politics, occurring independently of electoral-cycles and institutional asymmetries.…”