Types of Economic Voting in Regional Elections: The 2012 Catalan Election as a Motivating Case

The standard assumption that economic voting (EV) is “jurisdiction-specific” inevitably leads to a breakdown between “national EV” and “regional EV”. This paper challenges this overly simplistic distinction by proposing a more complex typology, whereby national and regional incumbents may be assessed in both national and regional elections, according to either national or regional economic conditions. Accordingly, new and more sophisticated types of EV emerge, such as “second-order EV” or “coattail EV”. In this paper, some of these new types of EV are verified with a suitable case study. The 2012 Catalan election was carried out in the context of severe recession, but also under the impression – among many Catalans – that the economic policies of the Spanish government were harshly punishing Catalan economic interests. Binomial logistic regression models confirm that, under political circumstances such as these, voters may use regional elections to assess the national incumbents' economic performance, whereas regional incumbents may end up exonerated from poor economic performance. This case study may be illustrative for other regional elections around the world.     

Immigration Policy and Hispanic Representation in National Elections

For the first time in U.S. history, after decades of unprecedented growth in interior immigration enforcement disproportionately impacting Latinos, ten percent of the U.S. House of Representatives is Hispanic. Using congressional district-level data on all candidates participating in general elections to the U.S. House of Representatives between 2008 and 2018, we show that intensified immigration enforcement suppressed Hispanics’ representation in congressional elections. The effect—nonexistent for other minorities, such as non-Hispanic Black candidates, as well as in primary elections—is driven by local police-based measures and diminished electoral support. Furthermore, it appears more harmful during midterm elections and in localities without a sanctuary policy.     

Impact of National Politics on Local Elections in Scandinavia

The impact of national politics on local county and municipal elections since about 1970 is studied at the aggregate national level in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. At this level, the local politics swing, i.e., the change in party support from one local election to the next, can to a high degree be predicted by the swing in national politics support. In Sweden, the national politics support is simply the party support at the national election held on the same day as the local elections, while opinion polls are used for Denmark and Norway. With the swing model for proportional impact from national to local politics, it appears that the national impact is stronger in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. The swing model can be improved by including feedback from the difference between local politics and national politics support at the previous election. The feedback force from national to local politics estimated by the feedback model is also stronger in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. Further, a preliminary analysis of Danish data indicates that the feedback model is especially relevant for analysis of data from the individual municipalities.