Localisation of politics and local electoral participation

ABSTRACT

Nationalisation of politics generally decreased the voter participation at municipal elections by lowering their salience, but the variation in nationalisation has been underestimated. Leveraging variation in two dimensions of localisation of municipal political competition – ethnic minority concentration and number of non-partisan local lists – this paper tests whether increased stakes and salience at ‘localised’ municipal elections increase electoral participation in respective municipalities. Based on the data from Croatian local elections (2001–2017), non-partisan lists drive voter participation, particularly in smaller municipalities. The effect of ethnic minority concentration depends on the minority status of the ethnic group within a municipality.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral participation
• non-partisan
• ethnic minorities
• local elections
• Croatia

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the participants of the workshop 'Comparing Local Elections and Voting: Lower Rank, Different Kind… or Missing Link?' at 2019 ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Mons and the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.sabor.hr/en/constitutional-act-rights-national-minorities-republic-croatia.

2. https://razvoj.gov.hr/o-ministarstvu/regionalni-razvoj/indeks-razvijenosti/112.

3. https://www.dzs.hr/default_e.htm.

4. The average turnout at national elections across municipalities was (in percentages) 75.98 in 2000, 64.52 in 2003, 61.67 in 2007, 59.24 in 2011 and 51.67 in 2016. The average turnout at local elections across municipalities was (in percentages) 52.01 in 2001, 47.81 in 2005, 53.22 in 2009, 53.45 in 2013 and 52.05 in 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marko Kukec

Marko Kukec is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany. His research focuses on legislative politics and political parties at national and local level, as well as politics in Central and Eastern Europe. He has published in Party Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative European Politics, and in several edited volumes. His recent book is titled ‘Individual Representation and Local Party Government’ (Springer 2019).