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Party systems diverge in their levels of nationalisation. While in some countries parties obtain similar levels of electoral support in all districts, in others parties get very asymmetric electoral shares across districts. The distributive consequences of this have been seldom studied. The argument tested here is that when political parties have nationalised electorates they have stronger incentives to provide social policies that spread benefits all over the territory. This argument is tested in 22 OECD democracies for the period 1980-2006. The results show that, regardless of the electoral system in place, there is a positive relation between party system nationalisation and social spending.

This paper studies the extent to which economic crises bust different reactions depending on individual ideological identity. Our argument is that individual left-right identification shapes how citizens evaluate the functioning of democracy, and consequently, it moderates the impact of economic crises on democratic discontent. We argue that left-wing individuals' views on democratic performance would be more heavily affected by economic results and strongly shaped by the (in)capacity of a democracy to represent its citizens in its reaction to the economic crisis. After testing our argument with data from the ESS, we provide evidence from a survey experiment conducted in Spain. Both analyses show that economic crises are relevant in explaining democratic dissatisfaction, but the strength of their impact depends on ideological identities. Economic results have a stronger effect on the satisfaction with democracy of left-wing individuals by negatively affecting their perception of the functioning of democratic representation. ; The publication of this article was funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg and the University of Mannheim. We would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for its generous support through grant ES/N01734X/1.

Research has shown that voting in European elections is affected by domestic politics. However, in the last years, and particularly after the European debt crisis, also the EU has gained relevance and salience in national politics. In this paper we address the Europeanization of national elections and assess to what extent the characteristics of countries condition the intensity of EU issue voting. Using data from the European Election Studies and the Comparative Manifestos Project, our results demonstrate the importance of congruence between citizens' and parties' positions on the EU for the individual vote on the national level and show how this varies across countries. We provide evidence that EU issue voting is more intense in countries with more political influence in the EU as well as in countries that are net contributors to EU funds. ; We also acknowledge the Economic and Social Research Council for its generous support through grant ES/N01734X/1, and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación through grant CSO2017-82881-R.

One of the most significant economic trends in the last decades has been the integration of countries in international markets. What have been the consequences of global economic integration upon the territorial organization of the states? Has it contributed to centralize powers or to further decentralization? The literature so far has provided inconclusive evidence. In this article we shed new light on the relationship between economic globalization and territorial politics by using a varied source of data such as the Regional Authority Index, and the KOF indices of globalization for the period 1970-2010. Results show that economic globalization is positively associated to decentralization, particularly in those countries with more regionalist parties and where levels of inequality are lower.

There is a large body of research showing that the provision of social policies is higher under proportional electoral systems than under majoritarian systems. This article helps advance this literature by showing that the geographic distribution of social recipients plays an essential role in moderating the impact of electoral institutions on social provision. Using data from twenty-two OECD countries, the results show that majoritarian systems increase the provision of social spending when recipients are concentrated in certain regions. When levels of concentration are high, social spending in majoritarian countries can surpass levels of provision in proportional representation systems. ; This article has received financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness: CSO2013-40870-R.

Some electoral systems favor strong single-party majority governments, while others the formation of coalitions. Having one or the other is likely to affect economic outcomes in ways that are unintended when the electoral rules are approved. In this paper, we show that government fragmentation has large fiscal implications. We also provide results that have a causal interpretation. Using a panel of Spanish municipalities, along with a close-elections regression discontinuity design, we find that single-party majorities run budgets with a 1.5% point larger primary surplus than that of coalitions. In addition, we show that lower deficits are driven mainly by single-party majority governments' capacity to raise more revenues. These findings are robust to several model specifications. ; We would like to thank Albert Falcó-Gimeno, Elias Dinas, Sandra León, Jeffrey Timmons, Didac Queralt, Pedro Riera, and Gilles Serra for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. We are grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for financial support through Grants CSO2013-40870-R, and CSO2017-82881-R.

The literature on party system nationalisation has yet to provide a better understanding of the impact of short-term factors upon the nationalisation of politics. This article helps to fill this literature gap by analysing the effect of economic conditions on party system nationalisation. The argument is that economic crises will decrease levels of nationalisation by amplifying territorial variation in preferences for redistribution, limiting political parties' capacity to coordinate divergent interests across districts and triggering the emergence of new political forces. Data on 47 countries for the 1960–2011 period confirm this hypothesis and show that lower economic growth during the years prior to the election is associated with a decrease in levels of party system nationalisation in the next election. The result is robust to variation in the specification of the econometric model and to the use of different measures of nationalisation. Results also show that federal institutions increase the impact of economic conditions on the nationalisation of politics, whereas any moderating effect of electoral system proportionality on the economy is not found ; We are grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for research supportthrough grant CSO2013- 40870-R

This paper studies changes in voting preferences over election campaigns. Building on the literature on spatial models and valence issues, we study whether (1) ideological distance to political parties, (2) assessments of party competence to handle different policy issues, and (3) voter-updated candidate evaluations are factors that explain shifts in voter choices in the weeks preceding the election. To test our hypotheses, we use data from three survey panels conducted for the 2008, 2011 and 2015 Spanish general elections. Our findings show that valence factors are more influential than ideological indifference to account for campaign conversion. ; We thank the journal's editors and reviewers for helpful comments. We are grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for financial support through grant CSO2013-40870-R.

When popular referendums fail to ratify new international agreements or succeed in reversing existing ones, it not only affects domestic voters, but also creates negative spillovers for the other parties to such agreements. This paper explores how voters respond to this strategic environment. We use original survey data from a poll fielded just one day before the 2015 Greek bailout referendum – a referendum in which the stakes for other countries were particularly high – in order to investigate how expectations about the likely foreign response to a non-cooperative referendum outcome influence voting behavior and to what extent foreign policymakers can influence those expectations. Our analysis of the Greek referendum shows that such expectations had a powerful effect on voting behavior: voters expecting that a non-cooperative referendum outcome would force Greece to leave the Eurozone were substantially more likely to vote Yes than those believing that it would result in renewed negotiations with the country's creditors. Leveraging the bank closure that took place right before the vote, we also show that costly signals by foreign actors made voters more pessimistic about the consequences of a non-cooperative vote and substantially increased the share of cooperative votes.

This paper explores the effect of national partisanship and Euroscepticism on individuals' causal responsibility attribution in European multilevel democracies. It is particularly focused on the average differences in responsibility attribution in federal and non-federal states, as well as in countries belonging to different European Union enlargement waves. Using a pooled dataset of the 2004, 2009, and 2014 European Election Studies, results show that when poor economic outcomes are at stake, partisans of the national incumbent in federal states are more likely to assign responsibility to regional governments following a blame-attribution logic, while this logic is absent in non-federal states. Likewise, Eurosceptic individuals are more likely to assign responsibility to European authorities when they hold negative views of the economy and they belong to countries that have been European Union members for a longer period. ; This work was supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [grant number CSO2013-40870-R].

This paper analyses which districts are targeted by Spanish political parties in their electoral campaigns. We find that the major Spanish parties - PP and PSOE - mobilise districts where they are more likely to win a new seat or are in danger of losing one they already hold. The predicted closeness of the district race is more relevant in the smallest districts. We also find that Spanish parties mobilise their strongholds. We suggest that, apart from the pure office-seeking strategies, political finance motivations might also play a role in the mobilisation choices made by Spanish party elites. ; We would like to acknowledge the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for its financial support through the project 'Comportamiento electoral y políticas públicas' [Reference: CSO2013-40870-R].

The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008. ; This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through grant CSO2008-01436.