All Politics is Local? Evidence of Local Council Incumbency Advantage in National Elections

We argue that the growing devolution of power to local authorities in European countries in the past four decades or so should lead to a growing influence of local politics and politicians in national politics. Specifically, we claim an incumbency effect across difference levels of politics, whereby parties that control a majority of seats in local councils have an advantage in national elections. To test this claim we employ an original dataset of 62 national elections results from 15 European countries at locality level and pair it with data on previous local elections. To overcome endogeneity issues, we employ a regression discontinuity design in which we focus on parties that barely win or barely miss a majority of seats in local councils. The estimated local effect gives incumbent parties an advantage of roughly one percentage point. This local council advantage benefit primarily parties that are not in national government.