Vertical Dimension of Responsibility: 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. Our paper provides the most comprehensive test of the multilevel economic voting model by simultaneously utilizing 410 regional election surveys (pre electoral and post electoral) from 41 regions in 4 European countries. 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 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. Second, we are able to investigate what drives the varying levels of multilevel economic voting in regional elections. We hypothesize that regional authority, the electoral system, the party system, and parliamentary-executive relations in the regions are important drivers of the extent of regional voting. 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 behaviour in multilevel electoral systems as well as of the (multilevel) economic voter. This paper we believe it will be well suited for the 3rd section of the panel entitled: political parties and party competition in multilevel states.