The Routledge Handbook of Local Elections and Voting in Europe represents the standard reference text and practical resource for everybody who analyzes issues such as local electoral systems, voting ...behavior, or political representation in Europe.
It provides comprehensive and expert coverage of 40 European countries - organized along the respective local state traditions - and in addressing a wide range of important questions related to local elections and voting, it broadens the scope of existing analyses quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Finally, it affords a more theoretically grounded typology of local elections and voting. Each country chapter is written by a leading expert and follows a rigorous conceptual framework for cross-national comparisons, providing an overview of the local government system, details on the place of local elections within the multilevel political system, specific features of the electoral system, analysis of the main electoral outcomes in recent decades, and, finally, reflective discussion. Representative democracy is as widespread at the local as at the national level, and as the significance of local authorities in Europe has increased in recent decades, local elections represent a crucial area of study.
The Routledge Handbook of Local Elections and Voting in Europe is an authoritative and essential reference text for scholars and students interested in local electoral politics and, more broadly, European studies, public administration, and political science.
Elections at the municipal level are often treated as second-order elections (SOE), subordinate to the national electoral arena in a manner similar to the European elections. The original SOE model ...expects incumbent national parties to perform worse, while predicting smaller and ideologically extreme parties to perform better in the second-order electoral arena compared to the first-order (national) one. Based on a dataset covering aggregate election results in three Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway and Finland) with party-dominated local governments and a time span of more than three decades, we find that the performance of parties in municipal elections only to some degree conforms to the expectations of the model. Parties in national government usually suffer losses in municipal elections, but the effect of incumbency is contingent upon the party size: only large incumbent parties are punished in local elections. We find very weak support for the hypothesis that extreme parties perform better than moderates and suggest that this can be explained by the organisational effort required to field the candidates and campaign in multiple jurisdictions. We conclude that the SOE model should not be applied as a default to municipal elections when explaining political parties’ electoral performance.
Recent years have brought increasing number of publications empirically assessing outcomes of territorial reforms. This paper provides a systematic review of 31 studies from 14 countries, using ...quasi-experimental research designs to test the causal relationship between changes in jurisdiction size and economic outcomes. The clearly confirmed finding relates to savings in administrative spending, while other sectors do not demonstrate economies of scale. The existing studies provide strong evidence for the common pool effect in theperiod before amalgamation. In the other fields, results do not display a clear pattern. The article concludes with a discussion of gaps in the literature.
Turnout rates vary between local and national elections. This paper promotes the national-local turnout gap as the best way to pinpoint the local component of voting at local elections. By analysing ...the national-local turnout gap instead of the raw local turnout rate, one can reduce the potential bias originating from the differences in socio-demographic composition and civic skills existing between municipalities of various sizes. Including data from 12 countries and almost 15,000 municipalities, it is demonstrated that a clear and consistent relationship between municipal size and local turnout exists: the larger the municipality the fewer eligible voters turn out at local elections (compared to national elections).
The conventional view of corruption emphasizes its detrimental impact on the evaluations of public institutions. This view implies that in corruption-intense environments, the public should exert ...strong pressure on relevant authorities to combat corruption. Yet, multiple historical accounts suggest that in such contexts, corruption tends to thrive even despite extensive state-imposed anti-corruption measures. In this letter, we address this puzzle by studying the context-dependent effects of individual experiences of petty corrupt exchanges on the popular evaluation of public institutions. Drawing on the literature on the functionality of informal exchanges and normalization of corruption, we posit that negative effects of such experiences will be attenuated by the presence of institutional corruption among public service providers. In contexts permeated by corruption, corrupt exchanges will become routine, with limited effect on citizens' perceptions of street-level bureaucracy. Our empirical test, relying on a unique cross-national survey dataset from Central-Eastern Europe and a fine-grained ecological (municipality-level) indicator of corruption, largely supports these conjectures.
This paper examines the use of preference votes under the open-list proportional representation system in the elections of assemblies at different levels of government. Our empirical analysis focuses ...on the elections held in Poland, where similar system is applied in elections of councils in three subnational tiers. This setting allows us to test the hypotheses concerning the impact of party magnitude and district size on the usage of preference voting. Earlier research demonstrated that the distribution of preference votes is heavily influenced by candidates’ ballot positions and their personal vote-earning attributes. While the ballot position serves as a cue for less-informed voters in all tiers, we demonstrate that the elections held in smaller constituencies, where voters are more proximate to their representatives, are more personal. This is reflected by the higher chances of changing the candidate order by using preference votes in constituencies characterized by the lower voters per seat ratio. We also find that preference voting matters more when party magnitude is larger. Our theoretical expectations are tested using logistic regression models, accounting for candidate- and list-level effects.
This article analyzes the discrepancy between participation in local and general (parliamentary) elections in Poland. The data demonstrate that the local-national turnout gap in Poland is smaller ...than in other countries of the region. The voter turnout in Polish local elections decreases along with the increasing size of local communities (municipalities), while the voter turnout in parliamentary elections increases along with the increasing size of municipalities. The analyses of survey data, performed with the use of multi-level regression models, demonstrate that the similar socio-demographic characteristics determine electoral participation in both types of elections. Nonetheless, in local elections an independent explanatory role is played by the population size of the municipality. This finding confirms the “proximity hypothesis” claiming that the elections taking place in smaller political communities mobilize larger electorates, even if the typical individual determinants of participations are controlled. “Local voters” preferring to participate in local than national elections concentrate in smaller municipalities.
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