Showing papers in "Regional & Federal Studies in 2023"
TL;DR: The second-order elections model captures part of these dynamics, but the candidate-centered politics model provides a more appropriate framework to understand the general pattern of these regional elections as discussed by the authors .
Abstract: Re-election of all incumbent Presidents, most of them from the Socialist Party (PS) or the Republicans (LR), was the main feature of the French regional elections of 20 and 27 June 2021. As a result, regional government remained controlled by the two parties that have dominated French politics since the early 1980s, even though both lost the 2017 presidential and legislative elections to newcomer Emmanuel Macron. The second-order elections model captures part of these dynamics, but the candidate-centered politics model provides a more appropriate framework to understand the general pattern of these regional elections. In a context of increasing split-ticket voting between regional and departmental elections, which were held at the same time, an era of divided government seems to have emerged since 2017.
1 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the authors present an analysis of de/centralization in Mexico during the period 1824-2020, building on an original dataset that coded three subdimension of the politico-institutional arrangement, 22 policy areas and 5 subdimension for each year during that time.
Abstract: This article presents an analysis of de/centralization in Mexico during the period 1824–2020, building on an original dataset that coded three subdimension of the politico–institutional arrangement, 22 policy areas and 5 subdimension of the fiscal sphere for each year during that time. The country evolved from a decentralized federation at the outset to a relatively centralized one nowadays. The Mexican case also sheds light on the importance of regime type and the ruling elite's ideological orientation to explain de/centralization patterns. Centralization was prevalent during two long authoritarian periods since the last quarter of the XIX century. On the contrary, dynamic decentralization occurred once the authoritarian regime began to erode in the 1980s. The ideological orientation of the ruling elite helped to strengthen those trajectories. When that elite embraced developmental ideas, the move towards centralization was deeper, whereas the opposite took place once national authorities embraced a neoliberal agenda.
TL;DR: This paper found that despite the heterogeneity of US states, counties, and towns, the share of the vote that Donald Trump received in the 2020 US presidential election was a strong and robust predictor of a lower June 2022 Covid-19 vaccination initiation rate, even after adjusting for sociodemographic composition, spatial effects, and diverse provisioning and takeup-related factors.
Abstract: In the United States over the past 40 years national issues and allegiances have increasingly displaced state and local concerns and identities in shaping the preferences of voters and the internal processes of political parties. This study finds that such nationalization has also manifested itself in health-related behaviour, specifically in the takeup of Covid-19 vaccines. Despite the heterogeneities of US states, counties, and towns, the share of the vote that Trump received in the 2020 US presidential election is found at each level to be a strong and robust predictor of a lower June 2022 Covid-19 vaccination initiation rate, even after adjusting for sociodemographic composition, spatial effects, and diverse provisioning- and takeup-related factors. At each of the three subnational levels, the Trump 2020 vote share was also correlated more closely than the Trump 2016 vote share or the Romney 2012 vote share with the June 2022 Covid-19 vaccination initiation rate. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors performed qualitative comparative analysis of 53 cities in Russia and found that a high share of young and educated people and the presence of organized civil society, but not the Internet consumption or the performance of city authorities, are crucial for the accumulation of protest potential in Russian regional capitals.
Abstract: The 2021 urban political protests in Russia in support of Alexei Navalny have swept the country, beginning in the Far East and reaching Moscow. They, however, displayed large variation in the number of protesters taking to the streets in the country’s regional capitals. While the immediate driver of urban protests is usually a political event or a decision of authorities, the willingness to protest accumulates before that, creating protest potential. To explain why some Russian regional capitals accumulate protest potential while others do not, we perform Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 53 cases. It reveals that a high share of young and educated people and the presence of organized civil society, but not the Internet consumption or the performance of city authorities, are crucial for the accumulation of protest potential in Russian regional capitals. These findings advance our understanding of urban political potential in autocracies as well as of Russia’s political geography.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic and its management factored into vote choices in provincial elections in Canada and find that pandemic considerations overwhelmed other factors, or was it a tangential consideration.
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another dimension of performance on which governments can be judged during elections. This article focuses on how the pandemic and its management factored into vote choices in provincial elections in Canada. Did pandemic considerations overwhelm other factors, or was it a tangential consideration? We address this question with data from a series of two-wave election surveys that were conducted by the Consortium on Electoral Democracy (C-Dem) using online samples of citizens.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors present a book on the nature and effect of public spending and its financing in India, taking into account the advances in theory and best practice approaches, and evaluate the effectiveness of intergovernmental transfers in a country marked with wide inter-regional disparities in taxable capacity and standards of public services provided.
Abstract:
Studies in Public Finance is a book on the nature and effect of public spending and its financing in India, taking into account the advances in theory and best practice approaches. It brings together several disparate pieces of scholarship on Indian public finance. Public finance begins with reasons for government spending—the failure of the markets to provide public goods, goods with externalities, and bring about desired state of distribution. In Indian context, public expenditure policies are dominated by political economy considerations with interest payments, subsidies, and transfers pre-empting resources leaving inadequate allocation to physical and social infrastructure. The ability to provide essential public services is constrained by the low revenue productivity of the tax system. Inability to finance the required level of expenditures through taxes results in large deficits and debt threatening solvency, stability, and sustainability from time to time. The rule-based fiscal policy evolved to follow a disciplined approach to fiscal policy calibration has not met with much success. The book also analyses the complexity of calibrating public finance policies in a large country with multilevel fiscal system. It also evaluates the effectiveness of intergovernmental transfers in a country marked with wide inter-regional disparities in taxable capacity and standards of public services provided. Finally, the book brings out the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indian public finances. The book will be useful to students of economics, scholars working on the subject and the policymakers.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors investigated how disparities in the distribution of economic, social, and institutional capital across territories affect voter turnout in Italian regional elections from 2003 to 2021, finding that electoral participation is higher in more economically developed regions than in less developed ones.
Abstract: This study investigates how disparities in the distribution of economic, social, and institutional capital across territories affect voter turnout. Analysis of Italian regional elections held from 2003 to 2021 reveals that electoral participation is higher in more economically developed regions than in less developed ones. However, the effect of economic conditions becomes more tangible in territories featuring high levels of social interconnectedness, whilst the institutional capital does not have a significant effect on electoral participation. By showing that voter turnout depends on the interaction between social and economic factors, this study indicates the need for a holistic approach to encouraging political participation, combining long and short-term strategies addressing territories’ societal and economic assets. Another important implication of this article is that ‘context matters’ also at the subnational level. This suggests that future work on turnout should rely more on comparisons across territories within countries.
TL;DR: In this article , a mixed-methods study of the recently amalgamated municipality Het Hogeland (Netherlands) was conducted to study how sense of place is politically mobilized and in what sense this corresponds with residents' associations with their living environment.
Abstract: Political-administrative reorganizations are often underpinned by spatial and historical narratives to tap into people’s sense of place and, this way, justify the new territories. Using a mixed-methods study of the recently amalgamated municipality Het Hogeland (Netherlands), we studied how sense of place is politically mobilized and in what sense this corresponds with residents’ associations with their living environment. While inter-municipal collaboration had an administrative-jurisdictional logic, during the merger preparation, Het Hogeland mobilized the residents’ sense of place through references to the area’s landscape, its vernacular name and music. It also devised a participatory process involving citizen panels, polls and civil society input. Resident respondents showed strong merger support, and we found similarities between their sense of place and the municipality’s marketing. We conclude that political strategies that mobilize locally embedded socio-cultural narratives and add co-constructive elements can bridge the gap between citizen and politics that regularly occurs following territorial reorganizations.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors explore the ability of regional authorities to engage in vote-seeking and explore how institutional and political multilevel structures affect these strategies, and demonstrate that the voteseeking of sub-national authorities is constrained in two ways.
Abstract: The decentralization of funding management poses a conceptual challenge to the study of political criteria in the allocation of funding in the EU Cohesion Policy, as existing research often assumes unidimensional actor constellations and motivations. Combining insights from distributive politics and multilevel party politics, this article uses a unique data set of beneficiary data at the local level from Polish Regional Operational Programs (2007–2013) to explore the ability of regional authorities to engage in vote-seeking and explores how institutional and political multilevel structures affect these strategies. We demonstrate that the vote-seeking of sub-national authorities is constrained in two ways. Competition between regional and national authorities limits the possibility of regional governments that are politically opposed to the national government targeting their electoral strongholds. In contrast, partisan harmony between different institutional levels incentivizes a vote-seeking strategy that takes into consideration electoral dynamics at both the regional and national level.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors argue that Brexit raised the option of rebalancing the self-rule and shared rule dimensions of regional authority present in UK devolution, and generate hypotheses regarding parties' territorial strategies and test them against a content analysis of 2015 and 2017 UK general election manifestos.
Abstract: In this paper, we theorize the 2016 Brexit referendum as a critical juncture in UK politics and analyse its effects on devolution using the concept of regional authority. We argue that Brexit raised the option of re-balancing the self-rule and shared rule dimensions of regional authority present in UK devolution. We generate hypotheses regarding parties’ territorial strategies and test them against a content analysis of 2015 and 2017 UK general election manifestos. We demonstrate that proposals dealing with shared rule grew between 2015 and 2017, within the context of consistency in parties’ overall territorial positioning. The governing Conservatives also offered more proposals on shared rule but not ones that increased devolved influence. Overall, they moved from favouring an increase in regional authority in 2015 to the cusp of maintaining existing regional authority and somewhat reducing it in 2017. This helps to explain whypost-Brexit UK government policy in practice maintained a primary focus on self-rule within a general approach of limiting the further growth of regional authority.
TL;DR: In this article , the authors discuss two-way spill overs between national and regional politics in both regions: that is, the influence from national to regional politics and vice-versa.
Abstract: Major changes took place during the most recent regional elections in Madeira (2019) and the Azores (2020). In Madeira, the PSD took office, but only in a coalition with the CDS-PP. After 43 years of regional elections, a pattern of non-alternation was suddenly changed to one of partial alternation. In the Azores, despite being the largest single party after the election, 24-years of PS rule came to an end with the victory of a broad PSD-led coalition that included CDS-PP and the PPM and which received parliamentary support from IL and Chega. The latter two, together with PAN, were new parties that won votes in the election.In this report, we discuss two-way spill overs between national and regional politics in both regions: that is, the influence from national to regional politics and vice-versa.
TL;DR: In this article , a case analysis of a city-region in sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. Accra, Ghana) was employed to empirically demonstrate the proposed conceptual framework.
Abstract: Evaluating regionalism in a glocal lens is important because it reveals the local contexts associated with cross-border endeavors in the global era. This paper seeks to extend existing literature by propounding a metagovernance framework for analyzing the inter-jurisdictional and multi-scalar nature of the concept. The model premised on the territory, place, scale, networks (TPSN) schema outlines regionalism in a glocal lens in terms of entwinements or embeddedness, hybridization, hierarchization, spatialization, temporalization and instantiation. Much of the prevailing literature on glocal regional governance primarily focuses on North America and Europe. To address this gap, a case analysis of a city-region in sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. Accra, Ghana) was employed to empirically demonstrate the proposed conceptual framework. Here, a local context of centralization and public sector-led development based on the state-centric school defines metagovernance as the government of governance. Thus, sub-national foreign relations are shaped by the national context.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the Prodi doctrine is only compatible with one source of political legitimacy that the EU partly depends on, the state consent model, which is a moral basis that is increasingly relevant for a supranational union of democratic states.
Abstract: The EU’s Prodi doctrine stipulates that a new state formed through secession from an EU member state will be treated as a third party vis-à-vis the Union. This article engages with debates on secessionism, self-determination, and democracy in the EU to discuss what the doctrine entails for the democratic legitimacy of the EU. We argue that the doctrine is only compatible with one source of political legitimacy that the EU partly depends on, the state consent model. However, it is not compatible with the voluntary association model which is a moral basis that is increasingly relevant for a supranational union of democratic states. The prevalent practice of organizing referendums on EU accession shows that securing popular support is today an important feature of the politics of legitimacy in the EU. We illustrate our argument with the case of Catalonia and contrast it with cases from the history of European integration.
TL;DR: Argentina exhibits an overall trend toward centralization, although not linear across time or policy areas, accompanied by strong centralization in the fiscal sphere, and greater politico-institutional autonomy for the provinces as discussed by the authors .
Abstract: Argentina exhibits an overall trend toward centralization, although not linear across time or policy areas, accompanied by strong centralization in the fiscal sphere, and greater politico-institutional autonomy for the provinces. These findings arise from a unique dataset gathered by 22 research assistants and curated by 18 experts for 22 policy areas, 5 fiscal dimensions, and 3 politico-institutional autonomy areas. In 1862, the country was very decentralized, but state building soon consolidated the federal government’s role in policymaking and fiscal relations, while provinces struggled to keep their politico-institutional autonomy until the 1960s, when challenges to their autonomy started to decrease. A centralization peak is observed in 1949, while decentralization junctures took place after the military coups of 1955 and 1976, and during the 1990s. Regime change cannot explain these changes. Instead, policy and fiscal de/centralization is best explained by the state-building process, the strength of presidents, and the economic trends.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors provide the first comparative analysis of voting over time in both countries and show how changing patterns in the relationship between national identity and party support have driven these differing trajectories.
Abstract: Despite an extraordinary degree of political turbulence in the UK, the 2021 Scottish and Welsh election results were remarkably similar to those recorded at the previous elections in 2016. While this period spanned the 2016 EU referendum, Britain’s exit from the EU, and the coronavirus pandemic, these upheavals appear to have had little impact on devolved election results. From a comparative perspective, however, such continuity only underlines the extent to which these nations’ political trajectories have diverged since the establishment of devolution in 1999. Using individual-level survey data from twelve election studies over two decades, we show how changing patterns in the relationship between national identity and party support have driven these differing trajectories. In doing so, we provide the first comparative analysis of voting over time in both countries. Additionally, we show how national identity helps to sustain single-party dominance in Scotland and Wales.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors explored how these frames play out as drivers of amalgamation preferences among local representatives and found that local politicians are more likely to support amalgamation when prioritizing and supporting functional scale considerations.
Abstract: Municipal amalgamations are commonly undertaken with promises of scale effects. But territorial reforms also invoke issues of local identity and democracy, which may be negatively impacted by upscaled local government. This article explores how these frames play out as drivers of amalgamation preferences among local representatives. Utilizing survey data of Norwegian local politicians during the 2014–2020 Local Government Reform, this article shows that local politicians are more likely to support amalgamation when prioritizing and supporting functional scale considerations. Conversely, they are less likely to support amalgamation when invoking issues of local belonging, democracy, and citizens’ influence. But these attitudes are not static. Sources of support and aversion towards amalgamation are at times conditional; the characteristics of the municipality, the individual's status in the local political environment, and the views of the population may both enhance and weaken the degree to which functional or communitarian frames are rallied to support or oppose amalgamation.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the effects of media works chiefly through the establishment of a "banal regionalism" and by increasing voter information, thereby boosting issues traditionally associated with regionalist success such as socio-cultural distinctiveness and regional autonomy.
Abstract: The media has been repeatedly demonstrated to have a large effect on voting behaviour and voter information worldwide, and to be crucial in the establishment of collective identities. Relatively unexplored in the field of regional politics are the effects of media on substate party system divergence and non-statewide party success. This article takes Europe as its focus and demonstrates how strongly regionalized media environments contribute to the development of distinctive party systems at the regional level. I argue that the effects of media works chiefly through the establishment of a ‘banal regionalism’ and by increasing voter information, thereby boosting issues traditionally associated with regionalist success such as socio-cultural distinctiveness and regional autonomy. The paper demonstrates this through a regression analysis of 69 European ‘Small Worlds’ and an illustrative case study of the United Kingdom.