Rethinking European Elections: The Importance of Regional Spillover Into the European Electoral Arena

Arjan H. Schakel

Journal of Common Market Studies, 2018, vol. 56, issue 3, 687-705

Abstract: The European Union has developed into a multilevel electoral system in which elections take place at regional, national and European tiers of governance. Election scholars have taken up an interest in European and regional elections and the dominant approach to study these elections is the second†order election model. This model has generated important insights but it also faces limitations. A multilevel party system perspective exposes several vertical and horizontal interactions between electoral arenas. An empirical analysis on second†order effects in European elections held in 217 regions and 11 countries reveals that regional authority, regional identity and electoral timing of regional vis†à †vis European elections significantly alters the extent and way in which national politics flows into the European electoral arena. These results provide strong evidence that regionalization has significantly transformed European elections but this impact only comes to the fore once one adopts a multilevel party system perspective.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12712

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jcmkts:v:56:y:2018:i:3:p:687-705

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0021-9886

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Common Market Studies is currently edited by Jim Rollo and Daniel Wincott

More articles in Journal of Common Market Studies from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().