Suchergebnisse

Regional politics is not at the centre of most Danes' political attention, but at the 2017 regional elections more than 7 in 10 Danes showed up at the polls to vote in the five Danish regions. Although several regional lists and smaller nationwide parties ran at the elections, the established parties already represented in the national parliament conquered all but two of the 205 seats. This is not to say that the voters simply copied their national vote–almost 3 in 10 voted for a different party at the regional elections than the one they would have preferred had they been voting at a general election.

It is often assumed that women's descriptive representation is higher at the local level than at the state or federal level. However, recent studies challenge this perceived pattern. Therefore, several alternative patterns of inter-level gender gaps in female representation across political levels are systematically introduced. Zooming in on the state-local gender gap, a number of explanations as to why such a gender gap can emerge are hypothesized. And the case of the U.S. is used to illustrate how women sometimes fare relatively better at state than local election.

The concepts of political leadership and political representation are applied to urban politics, and based on a case study of four mayors in Denmark, four mayoral representational functions are identified: "representative," "master of ceremonies," "local secretary of state," and "ombudsman." The four functions separate the mayor from the councillors who act only as representatives. With regard to representational focus (who is represented), the case study demonstrates that mayors have a much broader focus than councillors. The different functions and focuses of mayors and councillors are combined into two ideal types of representation, "leader style" and "legislator style."

Elections at the municipal level are often treated as second-order elections (SOE), subordinate to the national electoral arena in a manner similar to the European elections. The original SOE model expects incumbent national parties to perform worse, while predicting smaller and ideologically extreme parties to perform better in the second-order electoral arena compared to the first-order (national) one. Based on a dataset covering aggregate election results in three Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway and Finland) with party-dominated local governments and a time span of more than three decades, we find that the performance of parties in municipal elections only to some degree conforms to the expectations of the model. Parties in national government usually suffer losses in municipal elections, but the effect of incumbency is contingent upon the party size: only large incumbent parties are punished in local elections. We find very weak support for the hypothesis that extreme parties perform better than moderates and suggest that this can be explained by the organisational effort required to field the candidates and campaign in multiple jurisdictions. We conclude that the SOE model should not be applied as a default to municipal elections when explaining political parties' electoral performance.

Turnout rates vary between local and national elections. This paper promotes the national–local turnout gap as the best way to pinpoint the local component of voting at local elections. By analysing the national–local turnout gap instead of the raw local turnout rate, one can reduce the potential bias originating from the differences in socio-demographic composition and civic skills existing between municipalities of various sizes. Including data from 12 countries and almost 15,000 municipalities, it is demonstrated that a clear and consistent relationship between municipal size and local turnout exists: the larger the municipality the fewer eligible voters turn out at local elections (compared to national elections).