Voter's Perceptions on the Importance of Regional and Local Elections

Regional elections are often thought to be conceived by voters as second-order to first-order national elections. Voters do not turn out and when they do, they tend to use their local vote to send a signal of discontent to parties in national government. Research has shown that second-order election behaviour can be especially found in centralized unitary countries where sub-national governments have relatively few competences and where national identities are strong. Norway is a most likely case for citizens to conceive regional and local elections as second-order yet in this paper we show that only accounts for a minority of Norwegian citizens. We have fielded surveys to around 1,200 respondents in June 2019 and in October 2019. In the first survey we asked citizens about their perceptions of the importance local, regional, and national government. The second survey was fielded just after the Norwegian local elections of 9 September 2019 which enabled us to ask respondents about their motivations underlying vote choice in local elections. In this paper we systematically explore the impact of attachment to a government tier, centre-periphery perceptions, and the local/regional context (e.g. size of the municipality/region and presence of party strongholds) on when citizens conceive their local and regional government to be important and leads to a different vote choice in local elections than for national elections. We find that two different causal models underly perceptions about the importance of and voting in elections to county (fylker) and municipal (kommuner) government.