Second-Order Arguments for Second-Order Elections? Measuring “Election Stakes” in a Multilevel Context: The Case of Norway

Abstract

Low turnout and the prevalence of national arena motivation in sub- and supranational elections are claimed to be due to voters perceiving that less is “at stake” in second-order national elections. The article asks whether voters' differential assessments of election stakes when confronted with elections to different representative institutions are evidence of electoral sophistication. In the context of Norwegian elections to county and municipal councils, the standard approaches based on aggregate and survey data are juxtaposed with results from content analysis of local level politicians' argumentative behaviour, as they are exposed in readers' letters published in local newspapers. It is found that voters' differential assessment matches well with the message indirectly conveyed by campaigning politicians at the respective levels, suggesting that voters make adequate assessments of how much is at stake in elections to sub-national government. This substantiates the view that the second-order character is not inherent to all sub-national elections, but rather dependent on the overall institutional design of the specific multilevel system.