Throw the regional rascals out! A study on the link between regional election results and regional government formations

One of the main features of democracy is that citizens can vote the incumbents out of office. This accountability mechanism should guarantee that governments are responsive to the preferences of its citizens. Even though research on regional elections and regional executive formations has become more common, electoral accountability at the regional level has received little attention. This lack of attention is surprising given that executives and parliamentary-executive relations at the regional level are quite different from those at the national level. In fact, there are several reasons to expect that electoral accountability might be obfuscated: in many regions a central government representative is part of the regional executive, in a number of regions regional government formations follow consociational norms, and various regions are dominated by a single party (regional hegemonies). In this paper, we explore the link between regional election results and the formation of regional governments and how the institutional setting affects the formation of the regional executive. We make use of an innovative and extensive dataset that includes regional and national election results, the composition of regional and national governments, and regional institutions that govern the legislative-executive relations in more than 250 regions in 15 Western European countries for 1950-2020. The results have important implications for regional election research because they suggest that ‘what is stake’ in regional elections depends to an equal or larger extent on parliamentary-executive relations than on the authority exercised by a region as is often assumed.