Government Accountability in the European Multilevel Electoral System

Over the past four decades, fifteen countries within the European Union have introduced regional elections and the number of countries holding European elections has increased from 9 to 28 over the same time span. In addition to an increasing scope of regional and European elections there is also more at stake in these elections since authority has been shifted from national governments downwards to regional government and upwards to the European level. Scholarly interest in regional and European elections has increased as well and the dominant perspective to analyze non-national elections is the second-order election model which assumes that regional and European electoral outcomes can be linked to electoral dynamics in the national electoral arena. In this paper I will argue that the second-order election model faces some serious conceptual and empirical challenges and I set out to explore when and how national politics conditions or affects subnational and supranational electoral arenas and vice versa. In particular I will look at the question in how far the regional voters holds European, national or regional government accountable in various elections. I will explore the factors which condition this aggregate voting behaviour by exploiting a dataset which includes regional, national and European election vote shares and government data at the regional, national and European level for 12 EU-member states for 1979-2014.