This paper explores the effect of national partisanship and Euroscepticism on individualsÕ causal responsibility attribution in European multilevel democracies. It is particularly focused on the average differences in responsibility attribution in federal and non-federal states, as well as in countries belonging to different European Union enlargement waves. Using a pooled dataset of the 2004, 2009, and 2014 show that when poor economic outcomes are at stake, partisans of the national incumbent in federal states are more likely to assign responsibility to regional governments following a blame-attribution logic, while this logic is absent in non-federal states. Likewise, Eurosceptic individuals are more likely to assign responsibility to European authorities when they hold negative views of the economy and they belong to countries that have been European Union members for a longer period. 3 One of the most celebrated virtues of multilevel systems is better democratic governance. Indeed, classical normative theories state that multilevel governance helps to allocate power more efficiently to the most relevant level and enhance the control of governments by bringing them closer to citizens and overcoming informational asymmetries between representatives and represented. However, a more critical view stresses that vertical fragmentation of power makes the latter unable to establish a causal link between incumbentsÕ performance and outcomes, hampering their capacity to assign responsibilities. From this perspective, the peril of multilevel governance lies in that it makes voters less capable of attributing responsibility, weakening the rewardpunishment model and, in turn, electoral accountability.Certainly, individualsÕ capacity to assign responsibility between levels of government lies at the heart of the accountability mechanism of the reward-punishment model (Cutler 2004(Cutler , 2008 DŠubler et al. 2017). In this paper, the goal is to advance research on responsibility attribution by exploring responsibility judgements in multilevel systems. Building upon the political science literature on retrospective accountability and the social psychology literature on cognitive bias, the paper explores the role of party identification and attitudes towards the European Union in individualsÕ responsibility assignments, and tests for variation in this effect between different institutional contexts. In essence, the specific research questions are namely two: do group-serving biases in responsibility operate more intensely in multilevel systems than in countries with a unitary form of government? Do they operate more prominently in contexts where levels of governments are more consolidated?This paper provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the role of cognitive biases in responsibility attribution, with a particular focus in the variation between different institutional contexts. The first hypothesis assumes that multilevel 4 governance activates the use of cognitive bias in responsibility attribution, and th...

This paper explores the effect of national partisanship and Euroscepticism on individuals' causal responsibility attribution in European multilevel democracies. It is particularly focused on the average differences in responsibility attribution in federal and non-federal states, as well as in countries belonging to different European Union enlargement waves. Using a pooled dataset of the 2004, 2009, and 2014 European Election Studies, results show that when poor economic outcomes are at stake, partisans of the national incumbent in federal states are more likely to assign responsibility to regional governments following a blame-attribution logic, while this logic is absent in non-federal states. Likewise, Eurosceptic individuals are more likely to assign responsibility to European authorities when they hold negative views of the economy and they belong to countries that have been European Union members for a longer period.

Political parties and candidates have not been immune to the changes that the Internet and social media have introduced in electoral campaigns. Yet, as the use of digital media by political elites is becoming a norm in the United States, in Europe, the decision to develop an online presence depends on the cross-national differences regarding candidates’ constraints and incentives. European Parliament elections present an exceptional comparative opportunity to measure this potential diversity. Using an original database on the online presence of more than 5000 candidates competing under the label of incumbent parties in 2014, we demonstrate that there are two relevant groups of nonadopters, and that candidates’ online campaign intensity varies significantly depending on incumbency and the ballot structure in their countries.

In the context of the American federalism, integrated parties provide the necessary coordination mechanism for state and federal politicians to be electorally successful. This argument rests on the assumption that voters are able to observe the benefits of voting a straight ticket. We test for individual level explanations by using CCES data. Moreover, we measure the so-called 'two-sided' coattail effects in concurrent multilevel elections in the U.S. since 1960. By using a simultaneous equation model, we estimate the reciprocal relationship between presidential and gubernatorial vote shares at the state level. While we find no consistent presidential coattails, we reveal robust and significant gubernatorial coattail effects on statelevel presidential vote, underscoring the role of multilevel forces within parties in democratic federations.

Los excepcionales niveles de polarización política, fragmentación del sistema de partidos y volatilidad electoral que experimenta España en la actualidad recomiendan analizar los orígenes de estos patrones. Empleamos una combinación única de datos de encuestas a nivel individual y de actividad en Twitter pertenecientes a una muestra de usuarios de la Aplicación de Asesoramiento al Voto que lanzamos durante la campaña de las elecciones generales españolas de 2015 para investigar los determinantes ideológicos de la construcción de redes online de los individuos. Nuestros resultados demuestran que, entre los individuos que siguen los perfiles de los partidos/candidatos online, la promiscuidad política es el comportamiento más común, aunque este comportamiento depende en gran medida de las actitudes políticas de los usuarios online y offline entendidas en un sentido amplio.