The study of legislative voting behavior almost exclusively focusses on national legislatures and the European Parliament. A large part of political decision-making however takes place in decentralized government bodies. Furthermore many countries have decentralized powers and tasks to regional and local government. At the same time political scientists have only very limitedly studied legislative behaviour at those levels and in particular on legislative voting in municipal behaviour in municipal councils. This paper will bring the study of legislative voting behaviour to the local level by analyzing voting behaviour in around sixty municipal councils during the 2014-2018 term in the Netherlands.
Earlier research on legislative voting behaviour has found that coalition-opposition dynamics and the left-right axis form the most important factors that structure voting behaviour. As for the Netherlands both the voting results for around a fifth of the municipal councils has been collected through webscrapping and data on coalition participation and the local manifesto positions of nearly every elected party are available it is possibly to test whether the explanations that have been derived in the study in national parliaments also hold up for politics on the local level. The question under what conditions and to what extent voting behaviour is structured by the left-right axis and/or coalition/opposition dynamics will be analyzed by combining a multilevel regression analysis with a dyadic dataset. This approach makes it possible to test in what proportion variables explain the result.
Besides broadening the area in which legislative voting behaviour is studied the choice to focus on local governments in a single country also makes it possible to study multiple legislatures with uniform institutions and rules. That makes it possible to compare votes directly.
