A model of electoral competition between national and regional parties
| Author | Mihir Bhattacharya |
| Published date | 01 July 2018 |
| Date | 01 July 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0951629818774851 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
A model of electoral
competition between national
and regional parties
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2018, Vol. 30(3) 335–357
©The Author(s) 2018
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DOI:10.1177/0951629818774851
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Mihir Bhattacharya
Economics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, India; Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, EHESS,
France
Abstract
We consider a one-dimensional model of electoral competition with national and regional par-
ties. There are two regions and three parties—one national party and one regional party for
each region. We divide the paper into two parts—homogeneous and heterogeneous regions. In the
former, the policy positions of the national party and the regional party of the region with the
greater number of constituencies coincide with the favorite policy position of the region-wide
median voter. In the latter, the national party chooses a policy position in a maximal isolation set,
while the two regional parties choose policies on the same side of the national party’s policy
as their own respective region-wide medians. For a given outcome function, the national party
performs better when the regions are heterogeneous. In the homogeneous regions case, the
national party can at best do as well as the regional party of the region with the greater number
of constituencies. Our results are broadly consistent with intuition and evidence.
Keywords
Electoral competition; heterogeneous; homogeneous; regional parties
1. Introduction
Regional parties play a significant role in most countries with democratically elected gov-
ernments, at both the national and the regional level. They form governments at the local
level and also compete for and against national parties at the national level (Brancati,
2008).1Many papers model electoral competition over regions or districts.2However,
none of these models considers regional parties. In this paper, we model the electoral
competition between national and regional parties in a one-dimensional policy space.
Corresponding author:
Mihir Bhattacharya, Economics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 7 S.J.S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi 110016 India; Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Marseille, AMSE, France.
Email: mihir.bhattacharya@gmail.com
336 Journal of Theoretical Politics 30(3)
There are many definitions of regional party in the literature on political science.
However, the one we consider is the following one borrowed from Brancati (2008):
‘regional parties [ ... ] are defined as parties that compete and win votes in only one
region of a country [ ... ] Besides competing in only one region of a country, regional
parties tend to focus their agendas on issues affecting only these regions. Regional par-
ties stand in stark contrast to state-wide parties (or national parties), which compete and
win votes in every region of a country and tend to focus their agendas on issues affecting
groups throughout the country.’3Inour model, however, we consider a more abstract ver-
sion of this definition—a party is regional if and only if it competes only from the region
it has been assigned to.4
There are many countries with regional parties, for example, All India Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazagham and Dravida Munnetra Kazagham in India, the Bloc Québécois
in Canada, which competes only from Québec (Massicotte, 2005; Ziegfeld, 2012). The
UK has regional parties in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales which compete with
national parties. Even the national parties are mostly effective in particular regions, for
example, in the UK, the Conservative party in the ‘south’ and rural areas and the Labour
party in the ‘north’ and urban constituencies (Gallagher and Mitchell, 2005). There are
regional parties in Europe as well—the Lega Nord in Italy, Convergència Democràtica de
Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in Catalonia, and Partido Nacionalista
Vascoand Eusko Alkar tasunain the Basque region (De Winter and Tursan, 2003; Heller,
2002).
Regional parties influence policies significantly at all levels of government forma-
tion in these countries. Chhibber and Kollman (2009) find that regional parties are
more prevalent in decentralized federal systems since parties at the regional level can
implement policy outcomes. Chhibber and Kollman (1998) find that high levels of party
aggregation across different states in the USA have contributed to the prevalenttwo-party
system. In India, conversely, this inability to aggregate has made it possible to have as
many as seven effective parties at the national level. Brancati (2008) finds that regional
parties can win as much as 4% of the vote share in such countries as Argentina, Canada,
Germany, India, and Spain. We now describe the model briefly.
There are two regions, which are divided into mutually exclusive constituencies i.e.
every voter belongs to only one constituency, which belongs to only one of the two
regions. There is a discrete distribution of voters’ ideal policy positions in the one-
dimensional policy space. There are three parties—one national and two regional parties,
one for each region. A voter in region jcan only vote either for the national party or the
regional party of region j. Once the parties have chosen policy positions, voting takes
place. Regional and national parties compete on a national election platform to win as
many seats as possible.5
In our model, national parties have the advantage of garnering votes from constituen-
cies across the regions. Regional parties, conversely, can contest from one region. We
assume that these parties are given exogenously.
Weconsider two types of party motivation—constituency motivation and policy moti-
vation. Parties are constituency-motivated if their only objective is to maximize the
expected number of constituencies won. Parties are policy-motivated if they also have
a preferred policy position and their only objective is to minimize the distance between
the policy outcome and their most preferred policy position.6
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