Electoral strategies in multilevel systems: the effect of national politics on regional elections

ABSTRACT

Elections are at the heart of representative democracies. Whereas the study of national elections is a prominent field in comparative politics, we still know little about subnational political actors’ behaviour. We seek to close this gap by applying a dictionary coding approach to analyse parties’ issue-based content of 743 subnational manifestos in Austria and Germany. We show that subnational parties emphasize regional topics less if regional elections happen close to national elections but focus more on both regional and mixed topics if their national party organization is in government. This has important implications for electoral competition in multilevel systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional policy
• political parties
• manifestos
• Germany
• Austria
• multilevel system

JEL:

• D72
• H77

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Previous versions of the manuscript were presented at the virtual ECPR General Conference 2020 and at the virtual EPSA Annual Meeting 2021. We thank all discussants and panel participants for their feedback and suggestions. Furthermore, we thank two anonymous referees and the associate editor for their helpful comments and suggestions. Lastly, we thank Katia Werkmeister for her excellent research assistance.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. It is not the purpose of the article to explain why subnational parties emphasize specific topics more than others. We use the term ‘country’ to refer to the national level and ‘state’ to refer to the subnational (regional) level.

2. Subnational party branches have some leverage in positioning themselves in the political space; however, research consistently shows that they do not position themselves very far from their national party organizations (Giger et al., 2011; Gross & Jankowski, 2020; Mueller & Bernauer, 2018; Müller, 2009, 2013; Nyhuis & König, 2018; Stecker, 2015). Additionally, in some countries such as Belgium or Spain, subnational party branches must use some parts of so-called ‘framework programmes’ written by upper-level party organizations (Cabeza et al., 2017; van de Wardt, 2018).

3. The argument is about the fact of closeness in time between elections at the subnational and national levels, not about the sequence of these elections.

4. Our theoretical arguments and empirical strategy are not limited to the regional level but could also be applied to the local level. However, because Austrian parties only occasionally draft local election manifestos, we refrain from including local election manifestos in the following analyses.

5. We remain agnostic about the ultimate purpose of an election manifesto. Manifestos can serve the purpose of ‘contract/mandate manifestos’, ‘advertisement manifestos’ or ‘identity/principle manifestos’ (Bennie & Clark, 2020, p. 413).

6. We treat the CDU and CSU as one party in the following empirical analysis. Even though the CSU belongs to the set of ‘federal-oriented regionalist parties’ (Detterbeck & Hepburn, 2018, p. 134) and runs as a separate party organization as a state-based party (Thorlakson, 2009), both parties do not compete with each other in either federal or state elections, and the CSU ‘is part of the statewide political camp of Christian Democracy’ (Detterbeck & Hepburn, 2010, p. 110). Furthermore, both parties form a joint parliamentary group in the federal parliament (Bundestag) and are described as ‘sister parties’ (Schwesterparteien).

7. In some cases it was not possible to decide if the word belonged to the regional or national level (e.g., the German word for economy, Wirtschaft). For these instances we created a fourth vertical category in which we allocated those words that are either relevant for both the national and the regional levels, or where we could not find a clear legal competency.

8. This means that we are dealing with the ‘relative issue emphasis’ subnational parties devote to regional topics in comparison with the ‘mixed’, ‘national’ and fourth vertical category.

9. For a more detailed description of the dictionary, see Table A3 in the supplemental data online.

10. However, we use an alternative operationalization in one of the robustness checks (see Table A10 in the supplemental data online) where we calculate the number of days between the state and national elections as a measurement for the temporal proximity between these elections.

11. Some Austrian states use/used proportional representation as a principle of government formation (i.e., reaching a certain share of votes, every party is represented in government). It is, however, common that some of these government parties additionally agree on a working agreement. We only categorize signatory parties of these agreements as regional government parties.

12. This non-finding could be a hint that parties use shared topics as an electoral strategy making use of voter’s difficulties to clearly assign responsibilities to various political levels (e.g., León, 2011).

Additional information

Funding

All authors acknowledge funding from the International Association for the Study of German Politics (IASGP). Martin Gross acknowledges funding from the LMUexcellent Postdoc Support Fund. Katrin Praprotnik conducted this research under the auspices of the Austrian Democracy Lab, a cooperation with Forum Morgen.