Over the past four decades, fifteen countries within the European Union have introduced regional elections and the number of countries holding European elections has increased from 9 to 28 over the same time span. In addition to an increasing scope of regional and European elections there is also more at stake in these elections since authority has been shifted from national governments downwards to regional government and upwards to the European level. Scholarly interest in regional and European elections has increased as well and the dominant perspective to analyze non-national elections is the second-order election model which assumes that regional and European electoral outcomes can be linked to electoral dynamics in the national electoral arena.
In this paper I set out to explore when and how national politics conditions or affects election outcomes in subnational and supranational electoral arenas. A unique research design compares European and regional elections to the same and previously held national election for elections held in 130 regions in six EU member states for 1979 until 2014. This set-up allows for a direct comparison between second-order election effects in European and regional elections and one may observe in how far the same second-order election model can account for outcomes in both European and regional elections. In addition, the unique research design allows me to developed and test a voter fatigue hypothesis which expect SOE effects to decline when another SOE has been held earlier and a habitual voter hypothesis which expects that SOE effects decline in regions which exercise more authority. The results, however, provide mixed evidence for both hypotheses.
