Electoral Accountability in Regional Elections

The literature examining regional election outcomes has found time and again that second-order election effects vary greatly across regions. In second-order regional elections, discontent voters tend to turn out more than satisfied voters and those voters who cast a vote tend to express their dissatisfaction with national government. One important variable that can explain the wide variety in second-order election effects across regions is regional authority. This paper argues and finds that the institutional organisation of parliamentary-executive relations in regional electoral arenas also greatly impacts on the extent to which voters hold regional instead of national executives accountable. Second-order election effects tend to be larger in regions where the executive is appointed by national government or where the link between election results and executive formation tends to be opaque or 'broken' as, for example, is the case in regions with consociationalist party systems. In contrast, voters tend to sanction regional governments in regional elections when there is a directly elected regional executive and/or when executive power is concentrated in one office holder. The largest impacts of parliamentary-executive relations on second-order election effects is found when this variable is interacted with regional authority. The hypotheses are tested against a dataset with regional election results for almost 200 regions in eleven Western European countries for 1945-2015. The findings illustrate that parliamentary-executive relations in regional electoral arenas are an important variable that can make or brake regional electoral democracy.