The Routledge Handbook of Local Elections and Voting in Europe

Adam Gendźwiłł, Ulrik Kjaer, Kristof Steyvers, Adam Gendźwiłł, Ulrik Kjaer, Kristof Steyvers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000531220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Local Elections and Voting in Europe represents the standard reference text and practical resource for everybody who analyzes issues such as local electoral systems, voting behavior, or political representation in Europe.

It provides comprehensive and expert coverage of 40 European countries – organized along the respective local state traditions – and in addressing a wide range of important questions related to local elections and voting, it broadens the scope of existing analyses quantitatively as well as qualitatively. Finally, it affords a more theoretically grounded typology of local elections and voting. Each country chapter is written by a leading expert and follows a rigorous conceptual framework for cross-national comparisons, providing an overview of the local government system, details on the place of local elections within the multilevel political system, specific features of the electoral system, analysis of the main electoral outcomes in recent decades, and, finally, reflective discussion. Representative democracy is as widespread at the local as at the national level, and as the significance of local authorities in Europe has increased in recent decades, local elections represent a crucial area of study.

The Routledge Handbook of Local Elections and Voting in Europe is an authoritative and essential reference text for scholars and students interested in local electoral politics and, more broadly, European studies, public administration, and political science.

Part 1 Introduction

1 From perennial bridesmaids to fully fledged spouses Advancing the comparative study of local elections and voting

Adam Gendźwiłł, Ulrik Kjaer, and Kristof Steyvers

DOI: 10.4324/9781003009672-2

Labeling local elections and voting ‘the perennial bridesmaids of behavioral research’

Elections and voting are central research objects in political science, but national elections seem to steal the thunder. The focus of attention tends to be on the elections that determine the composition of parliaments and the leader of the country. All other elections, jointly labeled as ‘second order’ (Reif & Schmitt 1980), have attracted much less scholarly attention. This broad category includes not only supranational elections, such as European Parliament elections, but also elections in subnational units, that is, local and regional governments. The gap in our understanding of electoral behavior in these subnational elections and the peculiarities of the electoral arenas at the lower tiers of government have been noticed but not yet fully addressed. Within the emerging stream of literature that scrutinizes multilevel electoral politics, the local level is still a somewhat missing piece. However, in response to the progress of decentralization in recent decades, more and more studies of local elections are being conducted. In many countries, local governments are becoming (more) important pillars of the public sector, and therefore the representative democratic institution of local elections deserves scrutiny. And the scholarly interest in these important local democratic phenomena – hitherto characterized by fragmented insights in a few countries – should mature into more systematic research.

This handbook aims to contribute to the comparative study of local elections and voting. We argue that going local is not only pertinent in its own right, it is also a means to advance our overall understanding of elections and voting in multilevel political systems (Gendźwiłł & Steyvers 2021). Our knowledge of local electoral systems and insight into the patterns of voting in local elections are surprisingly incomplete. Reviewing existing studies, Marschall (2010: 471) put it this way: ‘to say that a field of study of local elections exists would be a bit of an overstatement’. Much of the existing literature is ‘rather small and not particularly cohesive’, and the ‘data collection and methods of analysis are also somewhat primitive’ (Marschall et al. 2011: 97). Elsewhere, Kaufmann and Rodriguez (2011: 101) come to a similar but more imaginative conclusion when they state that, ‘within contemporary political science, local elections are the perennial bridesmaids of behavioral research’.

A decade later, this continues to hold true despite the persistent function of elections as a key mechanism assuring representative legitimacy and accountability at the level closest to the citizen, where individual electoral participation might have the largest effect (Clark & Krebs 2012; Denters et al. 2015). Some progress in mainstreaming the study of local elections has been reported in the United States (Warshaw 2019). Yet, in the European context it can still be observed that local elections remain somehow in the shadows, despite the increasing importance of the local tier of the multilevel governance structure existing in many European countries (Loughlin et al. 2012; Ladner et al. 2016).

When it comes to the study of local elections and voting, a broad, cross-national comparative perspective is still missing. This remains in contrast with recent endeavors in the field of comparative local government covering other topics (Swianiewicz 2020), such as local autonomy (Ladner et al. 2019), local state-society relations (Sellers et al. 2020; Teles et al. 2021), the role of local politicians (Egner et al. 2013; Heinelt et al. 2018), and local territorial reforms (Kuhlmann & Bouckaert 2016).

Existing relations: lower rank or a different kind¹

Although relatively underexplored, studies of local elections and voting are, however, not entirely absent in the field. A search of the Social Sciences Citation Index based on the topics ‘local’ and ‘elections’ or ‘voting’ returned 1,639 and 924 articles, respectively, in the category political science since the late 1950s. Tellingly, in the most cited (nonmethodological) article, Lijphart (1997) discusses low voter turnout as a democratic problem of equality and influence. This includes how the issue specifically materializes at the local level as being a less salient but not unimportant arena. Implicitly, his contribution points to two of the dominant strands in the field – in most of the existing literature, local elections and voting are seen as either of lower rank or of a different kind.

The first perspective assumes that local elections are less important and less relevant than national elections. According to this approach, local elections are seen as second-order elections (Rallings & Thrasher 2005; Clark & Krebs 2012). This approach builds on the model developed by Reif and Schmitt (1980) regarding European elections; a field in which this model continues to be considered robust and consistent (Marsh & Mikhaylov 2010; Hix & Marsh 2011). Participation and party choice in local elections, similarly to those held in the other second-order arenas, are said to reflect the first-order arena considerations guiding parties’ and voters’ behavior. The latter will perceive less impetus to turn out (as less is at stake) but will be more inclined to switch their vote – as they do in European elections (Carrubba & Timpone 2005) – and vote expressively, for example, for small, fringe, and new parties or to punish or reward nationally governing ones. In this respect, a local election is treated as a nationwide event and essentially serves a barometric function, conditional upon the timing, that is, its placement within the first-order electoral cycle (Vetter 2015). This approach highlights the vertical integration of the local level into the national political system. Yet, it assumes that the relation between the local (second-order) and national (first-order) levels is asymmetrical, with the local level being an agent of the center in terms of execution and co-governance.

The second approach acknowledges the heterogeneity of local electoral arenas and claims that local elections and voting are of a different kind (Kaufmann 2004). Given the specific size of local jurisdictions (relatively small population), their scope of authority (comparatively limited constitutive powers with a focus on basic public service delivery), and/or bias (rather redistributive in resources), the local level produces particular electoral features and voting dynamics that differ from those found elsewhere (Oliver et al. 2012). Moreover, a ‘different kind’ of local electoral politics manifests itself in personal contacts with candidates and elected officials, lower costs of campaigning and generally lower barriers to enter the electoral market, and the widespread presence of amateur politicians. In local elections, place-bound considerations such as the perceived performance of local officeholders or the assessment of issues with deep ties in the community tend to dominate the mental calculus of national party identification, ideological assertions, or social group appeals (e.g., through organized interests). Oliver et al. notice that, in this regard, local elections and voting are more managerial than existential (2012).

Furthermore, size, scope, and/or bias are differentiated between places and polities. Thus, this approach highlights horizontal variation. Not only do local authorities differ substantially from their national counterparts but they also differ from one another. This heterogeneous, place-bound electoral dynamic makes local elections a bundle of local events. Obviously, there is a potential downside to the latter argument. Where localities differ substantially, idiosyncrasies lure. If particularities affect elections and voting across localit...