Municipal or Local Elections? The Fuzzy-Nationalisation of Municipalities’ Electoral Behaviour in Spain

Municipal elections in Spain are held on the same day all over the territory, every four years, across more than 8100 municipalities. In addition, in 14 out of 17 regions, local elections overlap with regional elections. Previous studies have interpreted municipal elections as second-order elections, focusing on the aggregate dimension of the phenomenon, and studying elections mainly in a synchronic way (Delgado, 2008, 2010; Márquez, 2007; López Nieto and Delgado, 1992; Vallès and Brugué, 1997; Carrillo, 1989; Martínez Fuentes and Ortega, 2010). The nationalization of local elections in Spain has always been analyzed either from the perspective of the perceptions of voters and/or by the strategies of parties. In this paper, we propose to take the municipality as the unit of analysis. This shift allows us to include a multilevel dimension and a different temporal dimension in the analysis of local elections. Our main question is whether local elections in Spain are completely second-order elections and therefore whether they are effectively nationalized in terms of the levels of electoral turnout. We test the hypothesis that nationalization of municipal elections varies depending on the size of the municipality: the larger the municipality, the larger the nationalization of electoral turnout in municipal elections. Our approach allows for much more nuanced conclusions than previous studies and it fills relevant gaps in the study of local elections, as Kjaer and Steyvers propose (2018). We first carry out a temporary analysis of the 10 held elections to understand diachronically turnout figures. Secondly, in order to integrate the multilevel dimension, we carry out a quasi-experimental design to analyze whether the coincidence of local with regional elections has a systematic effect on nationalization (participation) of local elections.