Accountability in Multilevel Electoral Systems

Scholars have noted that party membership and partisan loyalties have been decreasing, turnout has declined, and volatility (vote switching) has increased. These trends lead some scholars to draw pessimistic conclusions about the future of democracy in particular with respect to accountability of parties. However, these scholars tend to overlook a major trend which has particularly taken place in Europe and which has been coinciding with the aforementioned processes: the increasing scope and importance of supra-national and subnational elections. The number of countries holding elections for the European Parliament has increased from 9 in 1979 to 28 in 2014. Since the 1970s, 19 European Union member states hold or have introduced elections to a regional tier of government. The electoral transformation has been accompanied by shifts in authority. The stakes in supranational and subnational elections have increased because substantial authority has shifted from the national level to the regional and European levels. Opportunities have increased for voters to express their opinion about policies and governments across electoral arenas. The decentralization of authority and elections upwards and downwards has considerably increased the opportunities for voters to hold parties accountable across electoral arenas. In this paper I draw on second-order election scholarship and the US literature on the loss for candidates of the presidential party in midterm Congressional and state-level elections and I systematically assess the extent to which voters tend to ‘penalize’ parties in national government in regional and European elections held in 28 EU member states for elections held between 1979 and 2014. I am particularly interested in exploring the mediating effect of institutional factors (e.g. electoral systems, electoral timing, and government authority) and political context (e.g. government congruence, regional parties, and the state of the economy) on the punishment vote.