Conclusion: Regional Elections in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The 13 country studies presented in this book have analyzed the territorial heterogeneity of the vote in regional and national elections with the main aim of studying regional election results on their ‘own terms’ rather than solely from a second-order election perspective. Each chapter has explored the explanatory power of regional institutions and territorial cleavages with regard to regional electoral behavior (top-down approach), but the country experts have also provided additional causes or explanations for diverging regional party systems (bottom-up approach). In addition, all authors have looked at five aspects of electoral behavior which constituted the ‘backbone’ of the analytical framework for all country chapters. First, the authors looked at congruence between the regional and the national vote. Congruence of the vote was differentiated into three indicators: party-system, electorate and election congruence. In a second step, they assessed how far differences in the vote could be related to second-order election effects (turnout in regional and national elections and change in vote shares between regional and national elections) or to regionalized electoral behavior (congruence between regional and national governments and non-statewide party (NSWP) strength in regional and national elections).