The Impact of Election Campaigns on the Nationalization of Voting Behavior in Local Elections: A Case Study of the Antwerp Local Election Campaign

Abstract

Nonnational elections are at least partially determined by factors pertaining to the national level, which is problematic for the democratic functioning of these nonnational policy levels. Recent scholarly work has begun examining the impact of the election campaign on voters’ tendency to vote “nationally". However, these studies focus almost exclusively on European Union (EU) elections, and their findings may not be generalizable to other contexts. Moreover, they assume campaigns affect all voters similarly. In contrast, this study examines whether campaigns affect voters’ tendency to vote nationally in a local election, and whether partisan preferences condition the effect. These expectations are tested using panel survey data and a media content analysis collected during the 2012 Antwerp local election campaign. The results indicate that the campaign affected voters, making local considerations more important. However, the impact was conditional upon voters’ partisan preferences: When a party put more emphasis on the national context, voters preferring that party became more likely to rely on national considerations throughout the campaign.