Opportunities have increased for voters to express their opinion about policies and governments across electoral arenas. The number of countries holding elections for the European Parliament has increased from 9 in 1979 to 28 in 2014 and 19 out of 28 EU member states hold elections to a regional tier of government. The dominant view is to conceive of European and regional elections as ‘second-order’, that is, subordinate to first-order, national politics. Second-order elections have low turnout and parties in national government tend to loose while opposition, small and new parties tend to gain vote share. In this paper I compare second-order election effects disaggregated at the regional level for European and regional elections for Western European EU-member states for 1979 to 2014. The comparison allows me to systematically explore the impact of the institutional and socio-economic context on second-order election effects.
