The politics of local spending: municipal budget responses to federal election results

Rising support for radical-right parties has reshaped public discourse, yet little is known about whether electoral signals resonate across government tiers. Using two decades of data from 299 Flemish municipalities, this paper investigates whether shifts in federal electoral outcomes serve as signals of changing local voter preferences and are followed by changes in local government spending. Municipal fixed-effects regressions show that a 1% increase in a municipality’s radical-right vote share is associated with a significant 0.4% point contraction in municipal expenditure. This correlation holds regardless of the mayor’s party, suggesting an indirect, cross-party transmission rather than top-down partisan coordination. The analysis also reveals a symmetric pattern: rightward shifts correlate with expenditure contractions, while leftward shifts relate to expansions. The findings document a transmission channel through which federal electoral signals align with local fiscal choices, contributing to the literature on partisan politics and radical-right mainstreaming.