This introduction article inaugurates the first annual special issue on regional elections which sets out to nurture a community of regional election scholars who seek to understand the factors driving regional voters, regional election outcomes, and regional electoral dynamics across the globe. This is a much-needed research effort given that the territorial scope and importance of regional elections have increased considerably over the past four decades yet most scholarship remains focused on national elections. Collectively the articles and reports presented in this first special issue enable us to distil three contributions to the scholarship on regional elections: a refinement on the scope conditions of the second-order election model; the introduction of the concept of barometer elections; and the insight that each regional (and national) election is regionalized or nationalized to a certain extent, either in outcome and/or in relation to the processes that sustain the outcome.
Vertically simultaneous elections to statewide and regional legislatures provide us with a naturally occurring experiment in which to examine regionalism and multi-level voting. We examine the 2006 vertically and horizontally simultaneous statewide and regional elections in Ukraine to determine how the internal dynamics of regionalism within a state account for the dissimilarity of voting behaviour across electoral levels. Drawing on the party competition literature we demonstrate that variations in both supply (parties) and demand (voters) produce considerable dissimilarity between regional and state results, with lower levels of consolidation and greater fractionalisation at the regional level. We show that political cleavages operate differently across levels, that regional distinctiveness rather than regional authority better predicts first order-ness in regional elections and that voters display varying tolerance for polarisation at the regional and state level (132 words
The principle of cyclicality in the leading theory of multi‐level voting – second‐order election theory – assumes that simultaneous multi‐level voting should be congruent and that regional electoral contests should have no second‐order election effects: regional turnout should not decrease, parties in office should not lose support, while opposition, small and new parties should not attract more votes. This article tests the principle of cyclicality of second‐order election theory against a set of simultaneous multi‐level elections in order to explain why second‐order election effects rise and fall.
A multilevel electoral system perspective reveals several ways in which electoral spill-over may occur. Vertical spill-over may be top-down from the national to the regional level or can be bottom-up from the regional to the national electoral arena. Horizontal spill-over happens when developments in one regional electoral arena impact electoral outcomes in another regional electoral arena. The literature on regional elections has mainly focused on vertical top-down spill-over. In this introduction, we discuss two main insights in relation to spill-over between electoral arenas that surface when considering the collection of articles and reports presented in this fourth annual review of regional elections. First, we discuss how horizontal spill-over can be identified and differentiated from diffusion of electoral developments driven by territorial cleavages. Second, we discuss several institutions that impact vertical spill-over. We conclude by considering a wider research agenda for the study of spill-over in multilevel electoral systems.
The article explores the decentralization reform in Ukraine under the presidency of Petro Poroshenko in 2014−2019, evaluating its main results and challenges in the context of territorial consolidation and democratization. The article seeks to explain what made the policy makers choose the priority of increasing the institutional and financial capacity of local government to provide public services in the context of improving Ukraine’s cohesion and resilience to external threats in relation to its territorial unity and sovereignty. The article argues that the logic of decentralization in 2014−2019 has brought Ukraine closer to the EU by implementing the principles of subsidiarity and promoting local democracy in the framework of multilevel governance in a unitary decentralized state. At the same time, the article highlights a number of challenges that decentralization faced in 2014−2019, including the level of institutional coordination within a multi-level governance setting, as well as the limited effectiveness of the incentives to increase local development in Ukraine. In the first stage of the reform in 2014−2019, decentralization led to shifting the balance of power and resources between central and subnational actors and institutions, but did not institutionalize the involvement of the latter into the process of policy making at the central level. According to the logic of the Sequential Theory of Decentralization, the start of the reform from administrative and fiscal decentralization, as well as the postponing of political decentralization, can set the vector of reducing the degree of autonomy of actors and institutions at the sub-state levels on the further stages, especially in the case of limiting the financial capacity of self-government to provide public services. If the reform is successful at its the next stages, it will generate a useful example of a decentralized democracy outside the EU, being more resilient to external and internal challenges due to its strengthened local self-government. Ukraine’s decentralization reform can become an example for post-Soviet countries and some EU member states that seek to strengthen their territorial integrity. Key words: decentralization, territorial consolidation, multi-level governance, Ukraine
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.