Abstract
Despite greater responsibility being passed to local and regional tiers of government in many European countries, we still have limited understanding about what shapes citizens' support for such tiers of government. On the one hand we expect citizens to evaluate local government on its own merits, depending on the performance of local units. Yet in the context of multi-layered governance, we argue that local political support is likely to be at least partly a derivative of attitudes to the national level. The Dutch Local Election Study 2016 offers us the possibility to test these expectations. We show that local political support is mainly (in the case of local democratic satisfaction) or substantially (in the case of local political trust) related to national political support. To the extent that local support is shaped by local evaluations, appraisals of output performance are more important than appraisals of input or throughput performance. There is some evidence that these relations are conditional. Political sophistication increases citizens' sensitivity to local performance. Yet, local embeddedness only modestly reduces citizens' reliance on national-level evaluations.
Highlights
Devolution has become a common process across Europa and in the US (Jennings, 1998; John, 2001; Denters and Rose, 2005; Hooghe et al, 2010)
With multilevel models to control for nesting in municipalities, we find that local political support is based mainly or substantially rooted in national political support
The determinants explain ∼31% of the individual variance in satisfaction with democracy and ∼23% of the variance across municipalities. These figures are respectively 27 and 40%. We find that both local democratic satisfaction and local political trust are significantly related to local evaluations of political performance
Summary
Devolution has become a common process across Europa and in the US (Jennings, 1998; John, 2001; Denters and Rose, 2005; Hooghe et al, 2010). The shift of political and administrative responsibilities from national governments to regional and local governments has increased the executive power at these lower levels. Citizens express more trust in and satisfaction with politics and democracy at the local level than at the national level (Jennings, 1998; Cole and Kincaid, 2000; Chang and Chu, 2006; Muñoz, 2017). Studies on the factors that help us understand these types of local political support are rather scarce. There is evidence that this support is at least partly driven by evaluations of local performances, services, and embeddedness, either objectively (Rahn and Rudolph, 2005) or subjectively (DeHoog et al, 1990; Denters, 2014; Fitzgerald and Wolak, 2016)
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