Democratic Representation in Multi-level Systems

The Vices and Virtues of Regionalisation

Thomas Däubler, Jochen Müller, Christian Stecker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367729738
• eBook ISBN: 9780429515569
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Gouvernement américain

This comprehensive volume studies the vices and virtues of regionalisation in comparative perspective, including countries such as Belgium, Germany, Spain, and the UK, and discusses conditions that might facilitate or hamper responsiveness in regional democracies. It follows the entire chain of democratic responsiveness, starting from the translation of citizen preferences into voting behaviour, up to patterns of decision-making and policy implementation.

Many European democracies have experienced considerable decentralisation over the past few decades. This book explores the key virtues which may accompany this trend, such as regional-level political authorities performing better in understanding and implementing citizens' preferences. It also examines how, on the other hand, decentralisation can come at a price, especially since the resulting multi-level structures may create several new obstacles to democratic representation, including information, responsibility and accountability problems.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal West European Politics.

Assessing democratic representation in multi-level democracies

Thomas Däubler, Jochen Müller and Christian Stecker

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue ‘Assessing democratic representation in multi-level democracies’ from a conceptual perspective. It adapts Powell’s chain of responsiveness – as a model of the democratic process on the national level – to the context of multi-level systems and discusses conditions that might facilitate or hamper responsiveness in regional democracies. The theoretical reasoning identifies added complexity, multiple actors sharing the same label and cross-level interdependent decisions as the key challenges to multi-level democracy. Empirical illustrations focus on the first stage of the representation process. Here voters should form rational policy preferences and take informed voting decisions, and parties are expected to offer coherent policy platforms that are tailored to the specifics of the regional level. While the analysis of party manifesto data suggests that regional parties cover regional issues, and strategic incentives to focus on other levels appear limited, survey-based information illustrates the cognitive burden of multi-level democracy on voters. In combination with a synopsis of the other contributions assembled in this issue, the findings suggest that information, responsibility and accountability problems may be particular obstacles to responsiveness in multi-level systems.

In many democracies, representation takes place on multiple levels of governance. While some countries, such as Switzerland or Germany, were already founded with more than one tier of government, others have witnessed processes of regionalisation over the last 50 years (Hooghe et al. 2010). In virtually all large European countries that adhere to a unitary structure, some form of regional government has been installed and endowed with competences that formerly rested in the national capital (Keating 2008: 73).¹ This has gone hand in hand with the spread of democratic elections on the regional level and the development of regional party systems including non-state-wide or ethno-regionalist parties (Dandoy and Schakel 2013; Hepburn and Hough 2012; Swenden and Maddens 2009). In short, fully fledged regional democracies are widespread in Europe today.

Studies have identified functional pressures stemming from European integration and demands from regional political actors as main drivers of this phenomenon. These are often propelled by regional identities (Hepburn 2011; Hooghe et al. 2017; Petersohn et al. 2015; Toubeau and Massetti 2013). Yet while we have gained better knowledge of the causes behind regionalisation, our systematic understanding of how this development affects the quality of democratic representation lags behind. This lacuna partly results from the predominant focus on the national level that is taken by most political scientists, a habit Jeffery and Schakel (2012) termed ‘methodological nationalism’. Another reason is the multiplied cost of collecting comparative data on political institutions and behaviour when studies want to scale down from the national to the regional level.

This special issue contributes to our understanding of how regionalisation affects the functioning and quality of democracy. Instead of providing a summary of the articles that focus on various facets of multi-level systems, our introductory paper concentrates on a more general conceptual question: how does a country’s multi-level structure affect democratic responsiveness on the regional level?² Democratic responsiveness, understood as the adequate translation of citizens’ preferences into public policies, is a core aspect of democratic government besides the protection of fundamental rights, the rule of law and free elections (Dahl 1971: 1). It is commonly regarded as an indicator of the quality of democracy if the decisions of the elected representatives closely mirror the population’s preferences. However, the conditions facilitating this correspondence are quite demanding and may fail at different stages of the democratic process (Powell 2000, 2004): first, democratic responsiveness requires that citizens have a sufficient understanding of politics in order to form rational preferences and make an informed voting decision; second, the composition of parliament and government should reflect these preferences; third, decision-makers should act according to the will of the electorate.³

While some obstacles to responsiveness, such as a disproportional translation of votes into seats by the electoral formula, may appear independently of a country’s governance structure, others originate in the multi-level structure of the political system itself. To begin with, different levels of political competition put a strain on the cognitive abilities of voters and their willingness to engage with politics. Citizens need to evaluate and discern the programmatic offers and performance of parties, politicians and governments on different levels in order to use their vote effectively on each level. Failure to do so may lead to ill-informed voting decisions with negative consequences for responsiveness. Moreover, if citizens use their vote in regional elections to punish the national incumbents (see the contributions in Dandoy and Schakel 2013), they may well end up with regional parliaments and governments that are suboptimal representatives of their regional policy preferences. Furthermore, as politics is an interconnected game on different levels (Deschouwer 2003; van Houten 2009), parties and politicians may face incentives hindering responsive behaviour on a specific level. If parties strive for coalition congruence across levels (Däubler and Debus 2009; Ştefuriuc 2009), coalitions on the regional level may pay due tribute to political alliances on the national level, but be inferior to alternative constellations in matching regional voters’ interests.

Altogether, such multi-level effects may considerably hamper political responsiveness and damage the legitimacy of the respective political system. In order to facilitate the systematic analysis of multi-level effects on democratic responsiveness, this article outlines a theoretical framework and illustrates its analytical leverage with selected empirical examples. We build on Powell’s (2004) concept of the chain of responsiveness, which identifies three major linkages that influence how well citizen preferences are processed along the chain and ultimately translated into – desirably – responsive policies: the relationship between voters’ preferences and their voting behaviour (‘structuring choices’), the translation of votes into seats and the selection of policy-makers (‘institutional aggregation’), and the influence of elected decision-makers on public policies (‘policy making’) (Powell 2004: 92). While Powell’s original contribution focused on the national level of a polity (without reference to its structure of government), we extend the concept to the intricacies of multi-level systems, in which we find at least two levels of political representation.⁴ For our broader perspective, the difference between federal states and decentralised unitary ones is of secondary importance, although it is certainly relevant for more specific analyses.⁵ Our main theoretical and empirical interest lies in the extent to which citizens successfully form rational preferences and whether parties offer relevant choices to voters on the regional level.⁶ In addition, we highlight other contributions to this special issue that look at multi-level structures from other angles.

Our results show a mixed record of how multi-level governance influences conditions of democratic responsiveness. On the one hand, looking at the Belgian case, survey data show that few people (even among the highly educated) can correctly separate government from opposition parties at the various levels. On the other hand, a comparative analysis based on data from the European Election Study points out that multi-level structures are not associated with a larger share of citizens being unable to identify which level of government is responsible for dealing with what they deem to be the most important problem. Similarly, data on manifestos from regional elections in Spain provide reasons for optimism. Parties’ policy statements predominantly refer to the regional level, thus alleviating concerns about a potential supply-side bias of parties campaigning on messages that refer to different political levels.

These results, of course, only provide some spotlights on the democratic quality of regional democracies. A full analysis would also need to include the subsequent linkages of the chain of responsiveness. While our focus on the first link of the chain points to some serious vices of multi-level systems, their virtues may particularly lie towards the other end of the democratic process, since regionalisation is often justified as a functionally optimal response to the diversification of policy problems (Hooghe and Marks 2003). Yet analysing the full chain of responsiveness in regional democracies has so far also been hampered by the limited availability of comparative data on regional elections, the composition of regional parliaments and governments, and policy-making (but see Jeffery and Schakel 2012).⁷

The chain of responsiveness: from unitary to multi-level systems

Powell (2004: 91) defines democratic responsiveness as ‘what occurs when the democratic process induces the government to form and implement policies that the citizens want’. To facilitate a systematic analysis of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Assessing democratic representation in multi-level democracies
• 2. Party unity in federal disunity: determinants of decentralised policy-seeking in Switzerland
• 3. Does EU regional policy increase parties’ support for European integration?
• 4. Democratic regeneration in European peripheral regions: new politics for the territory?
• 5. When incumbents can only gain: economic voting in local government elections in Poland
• 6. Passing the buck? Responsibility attribution and cognitive bias in multilevel democracies
• 7. Federal reform and the quality of representation in Belgium
• 8. A world of difference: the sources of regional government composition and alternation
• 9. Who governs? The disputed effects of regionalism on legislative career orientation in multilevel systems
• 10. Party politics, institutions, and identity: the dynamics of regional venue shopping in the EU
• 11. Ideological alignment and the distribution of public expenditures
• 12. Decentralising competences in multi-level systems: insights from the regulation of genetically modified organisms
• Index