Abstract
Independent local lists (ILL) have become an important non-partisan actor in many local elections. However, little is known about which factors explain their electoral success. Drawing on recent contributions regarding the anti-establishment attitudes of many ILL, we argue that the rise of anti-establishment parties, especially the rise of populist radical-right parties, potentially harms the electoral success of ILL. Our main argument is that both actors attract voters that are dissatisfied with established parties. To test this hypothesis, we draw on the case of municipal elections in the German federal state of Lower Saxony. In the election of 2016, the populist radical-right party AfD competed in only a subset of all municipalities, meaning that some voters could cast their vote for the AfD in only some of the municipalities. We use a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effect of the AfD on independent local list’s vote share and demonstrate that ILL suffered strongly from the entrance of the AfD to the electoral arena. More specifically, our findings demonstrate that the increase in the success of ILL was halted in municipalities in which the AfD competed, while it continued to increase in regions where the AfD was absent. These findings suggest that the increasing success of ILL is due to voters’ dissatisfaction with the established parties and not necessarily due to an increasing interest in local issues.
Highlights
While many established parties have recently suffered from the increasing political distrust of their voters, independent local lists (ILL) are on the rise in many Western European countries (Aberg and Ahlberger, 2015; Otjes, 2020)
Given the findings reported by Gross and Jankowski (2020), it becomes clear that ILL tend to have very different ideological profiles which speaks against the concern that all ILL are ideologically similar to the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD)
While almost all established parties from the national level are active at the local level, ILL explicitly avoid running under a certain party label
Summary
While many established parties have recently suffered from the increasing political distrust of their (former) voters, independent local lists (ILL) are on the rise in many Western European countries (Aberg and Ahlberger, 2015; Otjes, 2020). It is argued that ILL perform better in municipalities in which the number of established parties competing in the local election is rather small. The case of local elections in Lower Saxony, as described above, allows for a robust analysis of how the entrance of the AfD to the German party system affects the electoral success of ILL.
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