Meguid, Bonnie M. (2007) Bringing Government Back to the People? The Impact of Political Decentralization on Voter Engagement in Western Europe. In: UNSPECIFIED, Montreal, Canada. (Unpublished)
Abstract
This paper examines how political decentralization affects levels of voter engagement. Political actors have often justified processes of political decentralization as means to “bring government back to the people.” While these claims are consistent with scholarly theories on voter turnout, aggregate-level analysis does not reveal the expected net shifts in voter attitudes and behavior in decentralized countries of Western Europe. Rather than signaling the relative unimportance of constitutional reform for voter engagement, this study finds that decentralization differentially affects members of the electorate. Using survey data to examine pre- and post-decentralization voter participation in Scotland, I determine that partisans of the regionalist, Scottish National Party are more receptive to the effects of this institutional change than affiliates of the national, mainstream parties. This paper suggests, therefore, that institutions do not necessarily have an independent effect on voter behavior; their impact is mediated by the individual-level characteristics of those voters.
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