Vertical Dimension of Responsibility: Study of Economic Voting in Regional and National Context.

Multilevel government is often thought to hamper electoral accountability because it blurs lines of responsibility between levels of government. This assumption has been only sporadically investigated in a limited set of elections using single country or single region studies. Our paper provides the most comprehensive test of the multilevel economic voting model by simultaneously utilizing 410 regional and national election surveys from 68 regions in 8 European countries, and aggregate data from regional and national elections held in 392 regions in 23 European countries. The unique and rich data enables us to test several important implications of the multilevel economic voter. First, we test the extent to which voters base their vote choice on their perceptions of the national economy relative to the regional economy. Instead of conceiving regional elections as either second-order or not, we are able assess the extent to which regional elections are seen by voters as second-order elections compared to first-order, national elections. Second, we are able to investigate what drives the varying levels of multilevel economic voting in regional elections. We hypothesize that regional authority, the electoral system, the party system, and parliamentary-executive relations in the regions are important drivers of the extent of regional voting. This study has important implications for our understanding of voter behaviour in multilevel electoral systems as well as of the (multilevel) economic voter.