Electoral Performance in a Multilevel Context: A Test of Regime Type and Electoral System on Nationalization

Abstract

In this methodological paper, we propose a multi level growth model to fit electoral data in a cross-national context in order to estimate the influence of predictors at the levels of country, party, or district on the variance components of the data. The variance components represent values of conceptual interest; namely volatility, dynamic nationalization, and static nationalization. We replicate tests of two institutional hypotheses to demonstrate the behavior of the model, confirming that parties in presidential regimes have lower levels of dynamic nationalization than parties in parliamentary regimes, and that parties competing under single member district plurality electoral systems have lower levels of static nationalization than parties competing under proportional representation systems.

Keywords: nationalization, political party