Close actions speak louder than distant words? The effect of local parties on voter turnout in Swedish local elections 1994–2018

ABSTRACT

Does the presence of local political parties increase turnout in municipal elections? A handful of previous studies have found that local parties indeed have this effect. Against that backdrop, we examine the impact of the rapid growth in the number of local parties on voter turnout in Swedish local elections. We test the so-called “best of both worlds” hypothesis, which predicts that the presence of local parties – alongside lists of local branches of national party organizations – increases choice for the voters, and thereby increases voter turnout. Our empirical tests employ data from seven Swedish local elections between 1994 and 2018. Ultimately, and contrary to findings from other settings, our results suggest that the presence of local parties does not contribute to higher voter turnout in Sweden. We maintain that this most likely is due to Sweden being a tough test for this hypothesis since Sweden has some unique institutional characteristics, such as concurrent elections and high baseline turnout in local elections.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Local electoral systems are described as hybrid when both national and local parties compete for seats. This hybrid system contrasts with countries where local lists are not allowed. This was the case of Portugal until 2001, where only national parties were allowed to compete in local elections. It also serves as a point of contrast with American local elections, which can be entirely nonpartisan/local, without any national parties on the ballot.

2 Since 2018, parties must receive 2% of the votes in order to get seats in the municipal councils (3% in a constituency, if the municipality has more than one constituency, but very few Swedish municipalities have that). The effective threshold differs depending on the size of the councils, but for most municipalities it is around 2%–3%.

3 It should be noted that our main result regarding local parties still holds when Models 1–3 are estimated without election year fixed effect, However, these estimations are less reliable due to underlying national trends in voting behavior. We have also estimated models with turnout in national elections as the outcome variable (see Table A6 in the Appendix), and we do not find any evidence that local parties increase in those elections either.

4 We have also estimated models using an additional alternative specification. Although bordering on the tautological, we nevertheless wanted to complement the main analysis with an analysis that tests whether local parties increase voter turnout when they are more successful in the election, and answer the question: do local parties increase voter turnout when their vote share is higher? We operationalized this variable as the aggregated shares of votes for any local party. The fraction of votes won by local parties reflects the extent to which local parties attract voters. The models in Table A5 in the Appendix include the same control variables as in the main specification, but the key independent variable is the proportion of votes cast on any local party instead of local party presence. As is evident in the appendix, the variable Share of votes on local parties is insignificant in all three models. Hence, even in the minority of cases when local parties are successful, it seems that the local parties foremost attract voters that already were politically involved and previously voted for the established parties (rather than eligible voters who previously abstained from voting).

5 Norway employs an open-list system with preference voting allowed. The proportional representation system assigns seats according to the Sainte-Laguë modified method and no threshold (Saglie and Segaard 2022). Councilors are elected at-large, with the municipality taken as a single multimember district. In stark contrast, the Portuguese system is one of closed lists, no preference voting, and proportional representation with seat distribution following the D’Hondt method. City councilors are elected using a mixed system involving at-large and parish-elected seats, but the local government system is clearly dominated by strong, directly elected mayors (Tavares and Camões 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This manuscript is part of the project “A polarized society? How local and national urbanization is transforming Sweden” (Länsförsäkringars forskningsfond P7/20). António Tavares acknowledges the financial support from the Research Centre in Political Science Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [grant number UIDB/CPO/00758/2020], University of Minho/University of Évora supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds.