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.
Many European countries are changing political boundaries at the local government level. Reforms consolidating local jurisdictions have recently been implemented in a number of countries, and more ...mergers/amalgamations are ongoing. We examine whether citizens' attachment to their local political unit is affected when municipal maps are redrawn. Our study is based on a dataset from Danish local governments with survey data from before and after a major reform of municipal mergers, and the traditional endogeneity problems are thereby circumvented. Drawing on Scannell and Gifford's tripartite model of person, place and process, we find that person characteristics affect local territorial attachment as well as the intersection between places of residence and the processes leading to the new jurisdiction. It is not an increase in the absolute size of the municipality (i.e., place) or the amalgamation as such (i.e., process) that affects the level of attachment, but rather the relative size of the former municipality compared to the new municipality and thereby the specifics of the redrawing of boundaries. When smaller municipalities are amalgamated with larger municipalities, the local territorial attachment decreases among citizens living in the smaller municipalities but not among citizens living in the larger municipalities.
There is a strong tendency across the world to amalgamate political jurisdictions, especially local governments. Merger of jurisdictions entails integration of local interests, and former ...jurisdictions have to struggle to secure political representation and specific area interests in the new amalgamated jurisdiction. We argue that this struggle is affected by the strength of the centre-periphery dimension of the new amalgamated jurisdiction. When a large city is merged with less populated jurisdictions, a strong centre-periphery dimension is created, and this leads to a numerical over-representation of the periphery in the legislature of the amalgamated jurisdiction. We test the argument empirically using a recent large-scale amalgamation reform that allows us to compare 66 amalgamations with different centre-periphery dimensions. Our argument is supported when we examine representation by seats in jurisdiction councils (descriptive representation) and politicians' advancement of local interests (substantive representation).
Council Size Matters Kjaer, Ulrik; Dittmar, Kelly; Carroll, Susan J.
State & local government review,
12/2018, Letnik:
50, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article “goes local” to investigate the representation of women on city councils, seeking explanations for the variation in women’s descriptive representation at the municipal level. Using the ...State of New Jersey (NJ) as a case, it is asked: what explains why women fare electorally better in some NJ municipalities than in others? More specifically, what explains “blanks”—or councils on which women are absent—in women’s representation in local politics? It is demonstrated that council size is a significant predictor of women’s presence or absence, but not percentage representation, on city councils.
It is often assumed that women’s descriptive representation is higher at the local level than at the state or federal level. However, recent studies challenge this perceived pattern. Therefore, ...several alternative patterns of inter-level gender gaps in female representation across political levels are systematically introduced. Zooming in on the state-local gender gap, a number of explanations as to why such a gender gap can emerge are hypothesized. And the case of the U.S. is used to illustrate how women sometimes fare relatively better at state than local election.
The concepts of political leadership and political representation are applied to urban politics, and based on a case study of four mayors in Denmark, four mayoral representational functions are ...identified: “representative,” “master of ceremonies,” “local secretary of state,” and “ombudsman.” The four functions separate the mayor from the councillors who act only as representatives. With regard to representational focus (who is represented), the case study demonstrates that mayors have a much broader focus than councillors. The different functions and focuses of mayors and councillors are combined into two ideal types of representation, “leader style” and “legislator style.”
The Danish legislators database Klint, Thorkil; Evert, Anne Sofie; Kjær, Ulrik ...
Electoral studies,
August 2023, 2023-08-00, Letnik:
84
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Elections determine the composition of legislatures, but the study of legislative representation has long been hampered by limited individual-level data on legislators. Recent innovations have vastly ...increased opportunities for studying legislators, but often have limited historical coverage. We introduce the Danish Legislators Database (DLD), a database of members of Denmark’s parliament, Folketinget, for every electoral term since its inception in 1849. Relative to most existing databases, the DLD is rare in covering the entire history of a parliamentary body going back more than 170 years. The DLD thus enables analyses of parliamentary representation with full temporal coverage. We describe the development and content of the DLD and present a set of analyses illustrating the potential uses of the database in the study of representation.
This article discusses the effects of the structural reform in Denmark in 2007 - where a large number of municipalities were amalgamated - on local councillors' influence on decisions taken in the ...local political realm. The analysis uses data from two large surveys, a pre-reform survey (2003) and a post-reform survey (2009). The analysis shows that the amalgamations have led to an increase in the perceived influence of leading councillors vis-à-vis other councillors and a decrease in the perceived influence of the council vis-à-vis its top administrative officers. Furthermore, it is found that there is an increase in the number of councillors who find that local political decisions are determined by laws and rules from central government, but at the same time it is shown that this increase cannot be ascribed to the amalgamations.
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