How do municipal amalgamations affect turnout in local elections? Insights from the 2015 municipal reform in the Austrian state of Styria

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we evaluate the effect of municipal amalgamations on election turnout in local elections. Following recent studies, we argue that municipal mergers can lead to less information about the election being made available to citizens and less influence for individual voters. That is, while citizens in the local context usually rely on their own direct contacts in local offices and among political candidates, the subsequent increase in population size due to a merger reduces opportunities for establishing such contacts and for having decisive influence on political decisions. Consequently, voters are less informed and less engaged, resulting in lower levels of electoral turnout in local elections. We test our argument empirically by using aggregate level data from the municipal level from the 2010 and 2015 local elections in Styria, Austria, which followed the amalgamation of some, but not all, municipalities in January 2015. The empirical results support our argument.

KEYWORDS:

• Municipal amalgamations
• voter turnout
• local elections
• Austria

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Sarah F. Anzia, Stephen Quinlan, Gabriele Spilker, and Jeremias Stadlmair for their helpful comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Austrian Political Science Conference (Salzburg, November 27-28^th, 2015) and the MPSA Conference 2016 (Chicago, April 6-9^th, 2016). The authors thank all panel participations for the valuable help. Furthermore, they wish to acknowledge Statistik Austria, Statistik Steiermark, and Marcelo Jenny and Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik for providing essential parts of data. This work was supported by the Department of Political Science at the University of Salzburg. Christian Schimpf also acknowledges the support from the University of Mannheim’s Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences funded by the German Research Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Conceptualising size in this way also captures the aforementioned nuances between centre and periphery and hence offers a more valid approach in this endeavour.

2. This does not, however, hinder voters from engaging in retrospective voting per se (cf. Dassonneville, Claes, and Lewis-Beck 2016).

3. Hayes and McKee (2009) show that, even in contexts of elections that are generally more salient than local elections, changes to the boundaries of political units result in lower level of information and, consequently, lower turnout rates. In their study on the consequences of redistricting in the USA, the authors find that changes to electoral district boundaries result in voters less likely to know their representatives, increasing the costs to obtain information necessary for them to decide to turn out for US House elections.

4. In the long run, politicians and citizens are likely to adopt so that the effects of municipality mergers are more likely to be temporary (Koch and Rochat 2017, 218). At the same time, however, municipality reforms could lead to an urbanisation of previously rural areas in the long term. Following sociological turnout models, this process can lead individualisation and decreased social pressure for citizens to turn out (Geys 2006, 643). Empirical investigations of long-term effects, however, lend more support to the former than to the latter argument (Hicks 2006; Koch and Rochat 2017).

5. As we may recall, this is consistent with the model developed by Settle and Abrams (1976), according to which an increase in available information increases turnout.

6. The mayor is elected by the local council. Every adult citizen of the European Union who has their principal residence in the municipality can be elected (Land Steiermark 2015a).

7. Because the next Styrian local elections are only set to take place in 2020, we cannot test the argument that the effect of municipality mergers is temporal and causes turnout rates to decrease primarily in the local election taking place right after the reform but not so much in subsequent elections (Koch and Rochat 2017).

8. In theory, we might also expect, if turnout rates increase across municipalities, that the increase should be considerably smaller in reformed municipalities. Such an observation would not undermine our theoretical argument per se. However, turnout rates in both reformed and non-reformed municipalities generally fell between 2010 and 2015. As a consequence, this observable implication of our argument is irrelevant within the context of our study.

9. We excluded two new municipalities that were the result of amalgamations on 1 January 2013, namely Buch-Sankt Magdalena and Trofaia. Graz was excluded as it did not hold a local election in 2015. This reduced the total number of observations from 287 to 284.

10. We also adjusted all control variables for pre-reform municipality population size.

11. Koch and Rochat (2017), for instance, show that smaller municipalities experienced greater declines in turnout rates as a consequence of municipality mergers in Switzerland than did larger municipalities. We do use a different approach, however, for the purposes of robustness checks (see Appendix D).

12. The Laakso–Taagepera index measures the effective number of parties.

13. We measure all variables either in the election year (political competition and Laakso–Taagepera index) or in the nearest year prior to the election for which data are available (financial strength: 2009 and 2013; population heterogeneity: 2009 and 2012). For population heterogeneity, we compare previous values with the latest ones that are available on the basis of the pre-reform municipal structure. For political competition and the number of parties, we apply the same strategy as we did for turnout rates and population size, comparing a municipality’s 2010 value with the value of the newly formed municipality if the respective community was merged.

14. Index: population heterogeneity = (HSS*HE/100) (cf. Heinisch and Mühlböck 2016).

15. For the official definition, see National Council (2007).

16. Descriptive statistics for all variables are detailed in Table A1 in Appendix A. Data for all variables were obtained from the official statistics bureau of the Federal State of Statistics Styria, Statistik Steiermark (http://www.statistik.steiermark.at/).

17. For non-reformed municipalities, this number, naturally, was 1. If there was, for instance, a case in which three municipalities were merged to form a new municipality, the number was 3.

18. We measure population size at the nearest points in time that data allows. For the 2010 Styrian local elections (21 March), we use the official population count from 1 January 2011. For 2015 (elections held on 22 March), we use the population count from 31 October 2014, which was available after the implementation of the new municipal structure.

19. In total, 542 municipalities were subject to the reform, which reduced them to a total of 287. Prior to the actual reform in 2015, six municipalities were involved in mergers on 1 January 2013. Buch-Geiseldorf and Sankt Magdalena am Lemberg became Buch-St. Magdalena, while Hafning bei Trofaiach and Gai merged with the existing municipality Trofaiach. Because these reforms took place at a different time, these municipalities were excluded from any follow-up analyses. Furthermore, Graz did not hold local elections in 2015 and was excluded as well. Finally, five municipalities (Kohlberg, Limbach bei Neuda, Oberstorcha, Schlag bei Thalberg, and Stocking) were split up as part of the 2015 reform and are therefore observed twice. This leaves us with the final number of 541 municipalities in the analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Political Science (University of Salzburg).

Notes on contributors

Reinhard Heinisch

Reinhard Heinisch is Professor of Austrian Politics at the University of Salzburg, Austria, where he also chairs the Department of Political Science. His main research interests are comparative populism, Euroscepticism, and democracy. He is the author of numerous publications including most recently, with O. Mazzoleni, Understanding Populist Organization: The West European Radical Right (Palgrave 2016) and, with O. Mazzoleni and C. Holz-Bacha, Political Populism: A Handbook (Nomos/Bloomsbury 2017).

Thomas Lehner

Thomas Lehner is a PhD student at the Salzburg Center for European Union Studies at the University of Salzburg. He is contributing to the Horizon 2020 Project ‘EMU Choices – The Choice for Europe since Maastricht’. His PhD thesis investigates the effect of EU negotiations on the politicisation of European Integration on the domestic level.

Armin Mühlböck

Armin Mühlböck is a senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science in the University of Salzburg. In the area of research, he concentrates on the local and regional level on the political system and on the Austrian political system (including dynamics of demographic change/development of democracy).

Christian H. Schimpf

Christian H. Schimpf is a PhD candidate in political science at the Graduate School of Economics and Social Sciences in the University of Mannheim. He is also a data processing specialist with the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Secretariat at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim. His research interests include comparative political behaviour, populism, and public opinion. His research has been published, among others, in Political Studies and Politics and Governance.