Looking around the neighborhood: how subnational electoral politics affects voters’ perceptions of parties’ positions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Local context has been shown to influence political attitudes and behaviors. We extend this research to argue that when a party performs better in a voter’s region or the region is more competitive, she will have more information on the parties and be better able to correctly identify the party’s positions. In addition, we argue that the strategy the party takes will also have an effect. To test our argument, we combine individual- and party-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and data on the party’s regional electoral performance from the European NUTS-Level Electoral Database from 1996 to 2021 for five federal or quasi-federal West European countries. Our results confirm our expectations. Our findings have important implications for understanding the multilevel nature of representation more generally, and how a voter’s local context shapes how she perceives parties’ positions and how parties can use local context to their advantage, more specifically.