Regional Political Institutions in Eastern Europe

Since the Second World War, regional governance (i.e., a government tier below the national government, but above the local government) has experienced a major transformation. This process has not only affected Western Europe, but also Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) have been decentralized since the 1990s. Currently, regional parliaments in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia are directly elected. Progress has been made in mapping and exploring the effects of regional political institutions in Western Europe. However, we know surprisingly little about how regional democracy is organized in CEEC despite the fact that also in these countries authority also been decentralized to regional governments. In this paper we introduce the extended Regional Electoral Democracy (RED) that includes an additional 156 regions and over 1,000 additional regional elections that have taken place in CEEC since the introduction of direct regional elections. We reveal how regional electoral democracy is organized in these countries. First, it can be noted that conceptualizations that are based on regional electoral democracy in Western Europe can also be applied to regions in CEEC. If we, however, compare patterns of regional democracy between Western Europe and CEEC, we find that in Western Europe there is wide variation in how regional democracy is organized. Meanwhile, almost all regional elections in CEEC fall in the majoritarian-centralized category. This has important implications for how we understand electoral behaviour and party competition in these newly decentralized countries.