How National Parties Nationalize Regional Elections: The Case of Spain

Cabeza, Laura; Gómez, Braulio; Alonso, Sonia

doi:10.1093/publius/pjw030

Cited by 24 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Braun and Schmitt, forthcoming), at the national and regional level (e.g. Cabeza, Gómez and Alonso, 2017;Müller, 2013) or even at the regional and European level (e.g. Schakel, 2018), parties simultaneously engage in political competition at different layers of multi-level governance systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Groß¹,

Krauss

2019

German Politics

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When analysing coalition agreements, scholars mostly concentrate on those agreements that are written at the national level. However, there is also a considerable amount of coalition agreements that are written at sub-national levels. This paper analyses the commonalities and differences in coalition agreements in the German multi-level system at the national, regional and local level. From a legal jurisdiction perspective, one would expect that there are major differences across political levels in the topics covered in the agreements. From a multi-level governance perspective, however, one would additionally expect that government parties also devote their attention to policy domains that lie outside their realm of legislative decision-making. We take Germany as a prime example for a political system characterized by joint decision-making authorities within cooperative federalism. Combining data from the Political Documents Archive (www.polidoc.net) with newly data from the Local Manifesto Project (LMP; www.localpartymanifestos.de), we analyse nearly 200 coalition agreements at the national, regional and local level in Germany by applying quantitative text analysis techniques. The empirical results show that governing parties mostly talk about the policy areas they are legally responsible for. However, particularly local and regional governing parties also address issues that are primarily part of federal jurisdiction.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Groß¹,

Krauss

2019

German Politics

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“…Alonso, Gómez, and Cabeza 2013;Benoit, Bräuninger, and Debus 2009;Gross and Jankowski 2020) and provided scholars with the opportunity to analyse these positions comparatively (Müller 2013;Stecker 2015), only recently scholars started to carefully consider the interactions between the national and sub-national level with regard to party positions, the level of decentralization and electoral systems' incentives (see e.g. Baumann, Debus, and Klingelhöfer 2017;Cabeza, Gómez, and Alonso 2017;León 2014).…”

Section: The State Of the Art And The Contribution Of This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems

Baumann

Ecker

Groß³

2020

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

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Sub-national self-governance is on the rise across European democracies. This increasing decentralization changes party competition in multi-level governance systems, and has broad implications for voters' ability to assign political responsibility and to hold politicians accountable. Regarding the interplay between party competition and dual accountabilitythat is, the attribution of accountability to the relevant levelin multi-level governance systems, we propose to distinguish conceptually between an electoral and a governmental arena. Whereas dual accountability in the electoral arena is challenged by varying degrees of party system nationalization, the governmental arena is characterized by a trade-off between the wish for clear-cut dual accountability and the need for political stability. We discuss these challenges in detail and link the various contributions in this special issue to these challenges. We add to the existing literature that increasingly deals with the theoretical and empirical challenges of electoral accountability in ever more institutionally complex systems of multi-level governance.

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“…Because of unpopular policies introduced by the national government, parties supporting the national government could provide their regional party branches more programmatic ‘room for manoeuvre’ to gain the support of disappointed voters (e.g. Baumann et al, 2017; Cabeza et al, 2017; Herzog and Benoit, 2015). Similarly, regional branches that are more successful in the region than the national party can feel legitimized to move away from the official national discourse in order to secure their pre-eminence in the region.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do regional party primaries affect the ideological cohesion of political parties in multilevel systems? Evidence from Spain

Debus¹,

Navarrete

2018

Party Politics

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Parties have strong incentives to present a relatively cohesive policy position to the voters across different levels of a political system. However, the adoption of inclusive forms of candidate selection methods like primaries could result in the selection of top candidates for elections on the subnational sphere who are not favoured by the party leadership. This is often seen as a threat to high levels of intra-party programmatic cohesion. Because subnational party organizations depend to a significant degree on the support from their national party, we argue that regional party branches that selected their top candidates by means of a primary adopt a policy position that deviates less strongly from the one of their national party. However, candidates selected by primaries might need to be responsive to the preferences of their regional selectorate, so that the incentives for parties at a regional level to deviate substantially from the position of their national party organization could increase. By analysing the content of 150 regional election manifestos of Spanish parties, we find that if a party’s top candidate for a regional election is selected in a primary, then the policy distance between the respective regional and national party decreases. However, this effect is not observable for recently founded parties.

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How National Parties Nationalize Regional Elections: The Case of Spain

Cited by 24 publications

References 25 publications

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Topic Coverage of Coalition Agreements in Multi-Level Settings: The Case of Germany

Party competition and dual accountability in multi-level systems

Do regional party primaries affect the ideological cohesion of political parties in multilevel systems? Evidence from Spain

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