Simultaneity, Asymmetric Devolution and Economic Incentives in Spanish Regional Elections

Abstract

This paper addresses two hypotheses. The first is that holding two or more elections at the same time is an institutional device to legitimize newly created regional governments by ensuring an acceptable electoral turnout at their formation. The second is that regional elections provide a participation incentive in relatively poor regions. The study draws upon evidence from the first round of Spanish regional elections (1980–99) when Spanish devolution was still asymmetrical. It empirically examines whether calling simultaneous elections for the European, national, regional and local parliaments and councils increased the aggregate voter turnout. Secondly, it tests whether regional income, inflation and unemployment rates influenced voter turnout. Its findings indicate that calling simultaneous elections can boost electoral turnout for newly created governments. Less affluent autonomous regions exhibited higher turnout—arguably due to a heavier reliance on regional government activity.

Keywords:

• Devolution
• institutional design
• elections
• economic voting
• incentives

Notes

Consequently, one might argue that depending on the political environment and whether the regional incumbent is of the same party as the ruling party at the national level, he/she might have an interest in either fostering or discouraging simultaneous elections.

More recently, the Valencian Community (Valencia) has reformed its statute of autonomy to allow for its regional executive to dissolve the regional parliament when it sees fit.

This period was chosen because there were important changes in the decentralization processes from 2002 onwards that conferred more responsibilities on the remaining regional parliaments. We therefore believe this period deserves separate treatment.

That is, when its (expected) utility offsets a wide range of (expected) individual costs, including time, information update and other transaction costs, as well as psychological deliberation efforts and emotional distress.

Despite the fact that some authors have defined voting as an irrational act, some argue for extending the classification of costs and benefits of voting so as to include civic duty (Mueller, 1989).

This data can be retrieved from www.ine.es.

Since the main explanatory variables are a series of dummies (or a combination of dummy variables) for whether there is a simultaneous election in a given year, the non-election years will simply be classified in the same category as the years with just one election. This could be thought of as biasing the result in the direction desired by the authors.

Some previous versions examined population and other socio-demographic factors, but they did not rate as significant and were excluded from the final model.

This simple method is extremely useful because the results (although simple and preliminary) do not depend on particular autocorrelation structures that could induce biased standard errors.