Local Party System Nationalisation: Does Municipal Size Matter?

Birds of a Feather or by Note? Ideological Nationalization of Local Electoral Manifestos in Belgium

“…Most longitudinal findings emphasize the sustenance or divergence in the local party system nationalization. For instance, based on a discrete assessment of multilevel partisan resemblance, Kjaer & Elklit (2010) confirmed the positive effect of municipal size on nationalization in terms of votes and seats in the Danish context whereas similar evidence for Austria (Ennser & Hansen, 2013) highlighted the (regional) degree of party organization as an additional explanatory variable.…”

“…This a central element in the work of (Rokkan, 1966, p. 244) associated with societal modernization implying '[…] the breakdown of the traditional systems of local rule through the entry of nationally organized parties into municipal elections'. Although this dynamic conception expects an almost teleological take-over of local politics by national political parties, traditional non-partisan elements continue to hold local ground (Aars & Ringkjob, 2005;Bäck, 2003;Kjaer & Elklit, 2010). Apart from remaining differences in the territorial anchorage of national political parties, this is due to the enduring presence and success of various types of non-national candidate lists in local polities (Copus et al, 2012;Reiser, 2008).…”

“…Most of the subsequent research has been concerned with the nationalization of the supply and the success of parties in the early phases of local elections (Ackaert, 2006). The predominant perspective is ecological comparing differences between municipalities resulting in explorations of local party system nationalization (Ennser & Hansen, 2013;Kjaer & Elklit, 2010). Complementary efforts have widened the scope to include later phases in local elections or to reorient the unit of analysis to the individual level of politicians or voters (Kjaer & Steyvers, 2014).…”

“…In sum, taking party lists as the prime unit of analysis the paper provides a crosssectional account of one aspect in a ditto dimension of the wider dynamics of the nationalization of local politics, albeit important and often neglected. This study endeavours to be a theoretical addition to the current literature on the nationalization of local politics, for which it transcends common limitations that prohibit a contribution to underdeveloped study of parties at the local level and their nexus with the national realm (Kjaer & Elklit, 2010). Moreover, by developing an innovative method to assess ideological nationalization and applying it in a representative context, the paper tries to empirically enrich the ongoing nationalization debate.…”

Split‐ticket Voting in Times of Sub‐national Government Reorganisation: Evidence from Denmark

“…If the decrease in the level of split voting is to be ascribed to changes in the local party systems, a precondition must be that the local party system actually changed between the elections held immediately before and after the amalgamation of sub‐national units – that is, between the 2001 and 2005 local elections. It has been demonstrated elsewhere that the local party systems in the bigger municipalities in the 2001 local elections in Denmark resembled the national party system more than was the case in the smaller municipalities (Kjaer & Elklit 2007); therefore, a potential for party system nationalisation existed when local units grew in size. However, before proceeding with a test of the party system hypothesis we need to check if the local party systems became more nationalised at the 2005 elections.…”