The Second-Order Election (SOE) model, developed by Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmidt in 1980 to explain voting behavior in European parliamentary and regional elections, is familiar to scholars of multi-level electoral behaviour. It proposes that voters regard European parliamentary and regional elections as “second-order”—that is, as less important than national elections. The model predicts that because less is at stake in these elections, they will suffer from lower turnout and voters will use them to cast protest votes against the nationally incumbent party, perhaps by taking a chance on a small party. This book examines party and voter behavior in multi-level systems with the goal of re-examining and refining the SOE model. The authors seek to address the main problem with the SOE model, as they see it: that it is a “macro-level description of voting patterns whose micro foundations are not robust” (143).
To identify the micro-level mechanism at play, the book employs careful comparative analysis, using individual-level data from France, Germany and Spain to empirically investigate the micro-level processes that underpin the party strategy and vote-choice elements of SOE behavior in regional, national and European elections in France, Germany and Spain. The authors examine four aspects of multi-level party and voter behavior: why and when parties campaign (mobilization), who votes and when (turnout), and which parties voters choose and why (strategic and sincere voting and attribution of responsibility). They find evidence that challenges some basic assumptions of the SOE model, and they revise the model in important ways, in particular through illuminating the role of party strategy and electoral systems.
The five authors are all experts in the field: Sona Golder on coordination and coalition formation, Ignacio Lago on electoral coordination, André Blais and Elisabeth Gidengil on electoral behaviour, and Thomas Gschwend on strategic voting. The book yields important refinements to the SOE model and contributes to the study of multi-level politics and the related literature on strategic voting, voter turnout, mobilization and accountability mechanisms.
The book's use of individual-level data allows the authors to assess the micro-level mechanisms at play in multi-level electoral settings. They note that while the model's predictions about turnout largely hold at the supranational level, they are less useful for predicting turnout in regional elections. Their survey data shed light on why this is the case. They find that voters often regard regional elections to be as important or more important than national elections. However, turnout is not only explained by the perceived importance that voters assign to a level of government; the attachment of voters to the regional level also matters. This leaves us with a more nuanced and less utilitarian account of how voters make their decisions. For instance, they find evidence that contrary to the protest voting predictions of the SOE model, some voters who vote for the opposition may be engaging in strategic balancing.
The authors also introduce a supply-side account through their investigation of party strategy. They explain turnout gaps by party mobilization efforts—when elites put effort into mobilizing and which arenas they target. Here, they find that party mobilization does not consistently follow second-order predictions. For instance, in regions of Provence, Catalonia and Madrid, they find higher mobilization efforts than at the national level. Parties will change mobilization strategies depending on which level is most important for them in terms of policy or office goals, and also depending on their chances of winning—more permissive electoral systems will shape their decisions. The book uses its micro-level data to develop nuanced theory that explains variation in party strategy across types of voters. For instance, the authors find that parties focus more effort on mobilizing “peripheral voters” at the national level, while at the European level, they focus on their core voters.
While this book brings parties into the theoretical framework with its analysis of party mobilization effort, it stops short of taking account of party organization and instead treats parties as unitary actors in their decisions to put resources into competition at the regional or national level. While this works for the European cases employed in the book, it limits the extent to which the findings can be generalized for the Canadian context, where we find weakly integrated or split provincial and federal parties. The authors acknowledge that party organization, which they do not address in their book, may have a role to play in the strategies of parties and choices of voters. This highlights an opportunity for future research, but overall the omission does not detract from the value of this important new contribution to the literature on multi-level electoral politics.
