Party Strategies and Voting Behaviour in Multi-level States
In the last decades, there has been a global trend towards the transfer of powers from the nation-state downwards to sub-national authorities and upwards to supra-national units such as the European Union. Regardless of the proliferation of elections at multiple levels of government in many countries, most research on elections is about national elections. My thesis contributes to a recently emerging wave of studies which challenge the common assumption that developments at sub-national and supra-national elections in multi-level democracies are fundamentally driven by national-level factors. Both the supply- and the demand-side are analysed (parties and voters). I specifically address to what extent voters make their electoral choices in local, regional and European elections on the basis of issues that belong to the specific arena being contested, and how parties proactively shape multi-level politics by strategically emphasising or de-emphasising national-level issues in regional elections. Empirical evidence is based mainly on the Spanish case, with one of the articles of this cumulative dissertation additionally looking at the case of United Kingdom.