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“Why analyzing sub-national elections? Insights from Europe and the Americas” DANDOY, Régis 助教(2018年1月当時)

Introduction of my research interest

My research project at WIAS deals with regional elections in Europe and Americas. The first reason I choose to include Latin America was because political science in the region is not developed compared to Europe, and the market is open for research thus my study attracts a lot of attention from the people in the area.
Another reason is more personal: my wife is from Ecuador and I have personal proximity to the area.

My research interest is to explain the results of regional elections and why and how they diverge from national elections, and show interactions between different types of elections. There are both executive and legislative elections in both national and regional levels; producing four types of elections. These elections greatly interact each other.

Fig.1 Four types of elections. They interact each other.

One of the challenges of my study is that there is lack of scholarly attention in this field. Also, data collection is another challenge as there is always new regional elections taking place and acquiring the data is not always easy. For example, solely in Latin America, I analyse 13 countries and 263 regions and there are about 4,000 regional elections taking place since the return from democracy, which is quite a few data points to collect.

Sub-national elections

In political science, elections are undoubtedly the most observed and analysed phenomenon. People pay a lot of attention to elections as we can see that “elections” is #1 topic for research and publications in political science. However, it is dominated by a so-called ‘methodological nationalism’, where researchers put too much emphasis on the national elections, or country level elections, at the expense of other types of elections, in particular subnational or regional ones. This phenomenon can be seen in different areas of political science, but is especially distinctive in the field of election studies. Regional elections are defined as the elections taking place in specific parts of the countries or territories. Tokyo Gubernatorial election in July, 2016 is an example of executive regional election, and Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election in July, 2017 is one of legislative regional elections. You can understand that these regional elections are really important for the full understanding of political process as they can contribute to the evolution of politics at the national level.

Why study Regional Elections?

I have six main reasons why we should include regional elections in contemporary election studies. First, we should study regional elections simply because they exist. There are some, surprising, extra-ordinary or even puzzling phenomena, which could draw public and academic interest in regional elections. There are three arguments in this perspective: theoretical, empirical and methodological arguments. I will briefly talk about the last two arguments here. From empirical point of view, some phenomena only occur in regional elections. One example is that in Argentina, each 23 province has its own electoral system and rules. Also, specific parties and candidates only exist in regions as in Spain, where national parties are very weak while regionalist and independent parties are strong in the regional levels. Thus, it is imperative to study regional elections to understand the politics in the country. Another point is that different voting behaviour can be observed between regional and national elections. Recently on December 3rd, there was a regional election in Corsica, a small island in South of France. Compared to the Presidential elections in April, 2017, there are vast differences in which parties gained votes between the two elections as shown in the chart below. This indicates that people show different voting behaviour in different type of elections.

Fig.2 Example of empirical arguments. Voting behaviour in Corsica was different between presidential and regional elections.

Another point of view is from methodological arguments. There are more data points if you include the regional elections when running a model. Also, countries are not uniform: there are variances in culture, demography, language, economy, history, and so forth, and all those factors have impact on the voting behaviour.

Second reason why we should look at regional elections is that they are important as they concern a growing number of citizens around the world. More and more countries organise regional elections especially since 1970s in Western Europe, Eastern Europe after the falls of communism, and Latin American countries in search for more democracy. Of all countries in the world in 2016, over 50% of the countries have regional elections, either legislative or executive or both. Legislative and executive elections are not the only forms of elections but there are also recall elections, referendums, by-elections, and so forth.

Third, regional elections are increasingly relevant given the growing decentralisation trends around the world. Regionalisation, decentralisation and federalisation directly increase the stakes of regional elections. Regions are gradually getting more power and becoming major actors in politics. There are two processes as to how regions are involved in the policies: Self-rule means that more powers are given to the regions in terms of competences, taxes, budget and so on, while shared-rule means that regional actors participate in political decisions at other levels such as local, national, and supra-national. The degree of self-ruled attributed to regions is increasing over time whereas that for shared-rule is relatively flat. As regions are getting to decide more and more and have more impact to people’s daily life, regional elections are increasingly becoming critical.

Forth, regional elections have a positive impact on democracy especially for the countries that are in the way for more democratisation. One example is in Brazil where regional elections in 1982 impacted the democratisation of the country in 1985. In the case of regional elections in Venezuela in October 2017, the parties against dictatorship gained majority in 4 regions of Venezuela, therefore creating a hope that this will trigger democratisation at the national level.

Fifth, regional elections have positive consequences on the quality of representation and of public policies and on the functioning of political institutions via a larger balance of power. In the regional elections, people see higher level of representation both in descriptive and substantive points of view. Elected representatives and voters are more “alike” in terms of language, ethnicity, religion, etc. For example, in Brussels, in regional parliament, seats are reserved for specific speakers of languages. Also, as elected representative and voters are physically closer to each other, they are expected to defend the interest of the citizens. Study showed that this substantive representation is much stronger in regional elections. Another key point is the concept of balance of power. Whether it is legislative vs. executive or majority of opposition party, balance is important not just in national level but in regional levels. For instance, the New Jersey gubernatorial election was one of the few elections after the Presidential elections and it was used as a way to counterbalance Trump’s dominance at the national level. Another examples of impact on the quality of government is that democratic innovations and better public policies are expected due to more involvement of citizens in decision making. Also, some study shows that regional elections lead to less corruption.

Sixth and the last reason on why we need to study sub-national elections is because of their impact on the national politics. This type of elections is called “barometer” elections or “crash test” elections where actors at other levels take regional election results into account when decision on their strategy for other elections as in the case of Party Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy. They created a party to run for regional elections in 2010 and 2012. Although they did not perform particularly well in these regional elections, they used learning from these elections in order to win national election in 2013. There are also impacts on career pattern as some politicians use regional reputations as a tool to create career at the national level. Vicente Fox, former president of Mexico, for example, used his good reputation being a good leader as a governor in a small state Mexico to run for a presidential campaign. Nestor Kirchner, former president of Argentina, and George Bush Jr., former president of the U.S, are other examples of this career pattern.

But subnational elections are not always good…

Regional elections can sometimes fuel independentism or secession as in the case of the regional elections of 2011 in Scotland, which led to Scottish independence referendum in 2014. Also, Catalan independence referendum was organised in October 2017 as a consequence of regional elections of 2015 in Catalonia. The independence claims triggered a reaction of the Spanish state that physically intervened in the referendum process and that constitutionally imposed its oversight of the Catalan government and called for new regional elections. On 21 December 2017, the Catalan regional elections led to similar results as in 2015 and may further feed the independentist demands. Regional elections could also lead to more conservative and change-advert policies and can be instrumentalized as Sevastopol gubernatorial election in September 2017 was viewed as a way to legitimate Annexation of Crimea by Russia.

 

取材・構成:椎根慶子
協力:早稲田大学大学院政治学研究科J-School

 

 

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