Questioning the Second Order Elections model for Spanish Municipalities

The second-order election (SOE) model as originally formulated by Reif and Schmitt (1980) suggests that turnout is lower in SOEs, government and big parties lose, and small parties win. For citizens there are “less at stake” compared with the presidential or parliamentary national elections. These predictions of the SOE model have often been tested in local elections using aggregate data. The fact that they are based on individual-level hypotheses has received less attention. This work tests the SOE model with municipal-level data collected from official sources and opinion polls. While turnout in municipal elections remains well below participation rates in national elections, the variation offers significant differences if we take into account the size of the municipality. Moreover studies on second-order elections also questioned voters directly on the importance of the different levels of governance. This variable is also are assumed to be strongly affected when we look at small municipalities. All in all, although the SOE model continues to wield significant explanatory power for local elections, the question whether Spanish local elections should be considered as pure second-order elections can be debated.