Still Congruence? Local Election and Party System Change in Italy and Spain

Italy and Spain are two countries where national party system reconfigured (both in dynamics and in format) after challenging/new parties, such as Podemos, Ciudadanos and the Five Stars Movement entered the political scene. As a consequence, in both countries, after the national election (2013 in Italy and 2015 in Spain), the party system moved from a bipolar to a tri- or multipolar one. This paper aims at exploring to what extent this pattern of reconfiguration may be valid also at the regional and the local level. In particular, it aims at answering two different research questions. First, if there is a congruence among different territorial levels (national, regional, local, and combinations of them) in Italy and Spain, and to what extent. Second, which are the determinants/explicative factors for such (in)congruence and its magnitude. In order to answer these questions, first an overview of the electoral results at the different levels as well as a description of the main events leading to those results will be carried out. Then, a group of independent variables - by relying on the second-order-election theory, the territorial cleavage approach, the party system theory and the leader personalization theory - will be examined through a regression model in order to explain under which circumstances multilevel party system congruence is likely (or not) to emerge. Our timespan ranges 2013 - 2017 and our unit of analysis consists of 103 elections: 2 at the national level , 29 at the regional level and 72 at the municipal level (considering those municipalities between 100 and 500 thousands inhabitants that voted both in Italy and Spain in ordinary status regions).