Institutional Conditions in Regional Economic Voting

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. As a result, we know much more about the individual characteristics driving regional economic voting, but less on how the institutional context impacts regional economic voting across different institutional settings. In addition, we do not know which institutions induce regional voters to hold the regional instead of the national government accountable when they are dissatisfied with government performance. Our paper provides the most comprehensive test of the multilevel economic voting model by simultaneously utilizing 410 regional election surveys (including pre-electoral and post electoral surveys and 454,679 respondents) from 41 regions in 4 European countries (Belgium, Germany, Spain and the UK). This paper makes tow contributions: 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. We further distinguish which of the performance variables in particular matter for regional elections, such as voters’ perceptions of incumbents political, economic, or general performance. Second, we hypothesize and assess how the impact of these individual level perceptions are conditioned by regional authority, the electoral system, the party system, and parliamentary-executive relations. Due to the heterogeneity of the data across the surveys used in this study, we combine two different research strategies, i.e., weighted pooled effect size approach and multilevel fixed effects modelling. This study has important implications for our understanding of voter behavior in multilevel government systems as well as of the multilevel economic voter.