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

The alternation of parties in government has not only an important effect on democratic quality, but the extent to which governments alternate also has an effect on a wide range of policy outputs (e.g., Anthonsen & Lindvall, 2009; Green-Pedersen, 2002). While in many regions, government parties alternate frequently. There are several regions that are effectively governed by one single party (Schakel & Massetti, 2018). Sometimes this is because of the presence of hegemonic regional parties (e.g., the CSU in Bavaria, the SVP in Südtirol, or the PNV in Basque Country) that have governed these regions for several decades in a row. But also, statewide parties can have local strongholds (e.g., the Norwegian Labour Party has always been the largest party in the three (formerly five) most northern regions, and the Dutch Catholic Party, before its merger into the CDA, always obtained an absolute majority in the provinces of Noord-Brabant, and Limburg). We thus observe territorial heterogeneity in the extent to which we observe government turnover. The extent to which government parties alternate is not only a relevant question to understand differences in policy outcomes across regions, but it is also one of the main features of democracy: citizens must be able to 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). We can thus expect to observe territorial heterogeneity in the way regional democracy functions. 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.