Arena Shopping: The Effects of Decentralization on the Selective Entry of Ethnoterritorial Parties in Parliamentary Elections

Despite extensive research, remarkably little is known about a party’s decision to contest individual districts in a given election. A survey of district-level election data across democratic countries has called into question the common perception that most parties contest all districts in a particular election, but the reasons why parties choose to field or not field a candidate remain under examined.

In this paper, I explore the effects of institutional factors on selective entry. I am specifically interested in the impact of one of the more common reforms – decentralization – on the decision of a party to contest particular electoral districts across time, across subnational regions and across election types in a country. Given that political, fiscal and administrative decentralization processes alter the existing power balance between national and subnational office, do resource-constrained political parties, like ethnoterritorial parties, shift their electoral strategy after decentralization reforms to increase the number of candidates contesting districts in elections to the newly strengthened subnational governments and to decrease the number of candidates contesting districts in elections to the newly weakened national governments?

This paper uses an original multilevel elections dataset of subnational regions in Western European countries from 1970 to 2006 to examine candidate entry decisions. Based on my current work on the strategic nature of decentralization processes and the finding that regionalist parties are electorally advantaged in subnational elections and electorally disadvantaged in national elections post-decentralization, I expect to see differential effects of decentralization on ethnoterritorial party entry by level of government.