Ideological proximity and voter turnout in multi-level systems: evidence from Spain

ABSTRACT

Does ideological proximity between the individual and political parties determine electoral participation in regional elections, as much as in national elections? Does the degree of self-rule of a region affect the interplay between ideological distance and turnout? This article addresses these questions and provides empirical evidence drawing upon individual-level and regional-level data from 53 regional elections and 4 national elections in Spain. Results indicate that citizens are more likely to vote when they perceive there is at least one congruent policy option among the party supply, and this happens at both regional and national levels. However, whether the closest party is in national government or whether it is a regionalist organization has a dissimilar impact on turnout in different tiers. This relationship between the type of party which is most ideologically proximate and electoral participation is partially affected by the degree of regional autonomy of the territory.

This article is part of a series including:

Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems

Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Anna Adendorf for her very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. I also thank the editors of this special issue and the two anonymous referees for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The historic regions are historical nationalities with a distinct culture and language. In this case I have also included in this group Navarre, which is not recognized as an historic region in the Constitution, but which is often included in this group (Vall-Prat and Rodon 2017, 729).

2 In the case of Andalusia, regional elections held in 2008 and 2004 took place at the same time as the national elections and the questions concerning the perceived ideological positions of political parties refer to the national level only. For this reason, I did not include data from these two regional studies.

3 The final datasets that support the findings of this study are available from the author upon request.

4 As a robustness check, analyses were replicated without these individuals who despite placing themselves on the ideological scale did not locate any political party and results did not significantly change.

5 The reason to pay attention to ideological extremism is that Lefkofridi, Giger, and Gallego (2014) showed that extremist citizens participate more when there are viable congruent options.

6 Gender is measured by a dummy variable that takes value 0 when male and 1 when female. Education is also a dichotomous variable and takes value 1 when the respondent has higher education and 0 if not. Occupational status is measured by a dummy that scores 1 when the individual is unemployed and 0 otherwise. Finally, age is included as a continuous variable together with its squared term. More information about the variables can be found in Tables A.1. and A.2. in the Appendix.

7 See also Figures A.1. and A.2. in the Appendix with results for only those individuals whose congruence scores are between −5 and 0.

8 It must be noted that samples in national studies from the regions in which the confidence intervals of those who reported their abstention are wider- these are La Rioja, Murcia and Navarre- are smaller.

9 See models in Table A.3. in the Appendix.

10 See models in Table A.4. in the Appendix.

11 See models in Table A.5. in the Appendix.

12 While these results remain accurate for the case of analysis without extreme incongruence (See Table A.6. in the Appendix), this is not the case when historic regions are not included (See Table A.7. in the Appendix). However, it must be noted that these are the Spanish regions with more competences and higher regional budget per capita so excluding these from the analysis implies using a sample that does not contain the most devolved regions.