Local incumbency advantage versus national incumbency disadvantage – refining the second-order election model with arena-specific features

Local elections are often treated as second-order, subordinate to the national electoral arena in a similar manner as the elections of the European Parliament are. The original second-order election (SOE) model expects incumbent national parties to perform worse while smaller and extreme parties perform better in SOE. Yet, the original model ignores the significance of arena-specific incumbency. While it is difficult to clearly identify the government-opposition divide in the European arena, this distinction matters in local politics. Based on the literature on “dual accountability” and the original fine-grained dataset combining the results of local and national elections in 98 Danish municipalities since 2007, we argue that the arena-specific considerations play an indispensable role in explaining parties’ gains and losses in elections held at the local level. Our analyses conducted in a country with extremely highly nationalized local politics, where party affiliations provide a clear linkage between arenas, document a substantial bonus for local incumbent parties. It is far greater than the national incumbents’ losses, typically observed in lower-stake elections with a “barometric” function.