Regional economic voting and institutional characteristics: How citizens react to regional and national economic conditions?

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 401 regional election surveys from 41 regions in 4 European countries, using survey questionnaires for both national and regional level incumbents. 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 regional economy conditioned by varying levels of institutional regime/executive control (i.e., shared rule between regional and national executive tier). We hypothesize that executive control in the regions are important drivers of the extent of regional voting. Second, we test the effect of second order elections in regional economic voting by considering the national status of the incumbent governments in national and regional elections. This study has important implications for our understanding of voter behaviour in multilevel electoral systems as well as of the (multilevel) economic voter.