between first and second order: a comparison of voting behaviour in european and local elections in...

European Journal of Political Research35: 389–414, 1999.© 1999Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

389

Between first and second order: A comparison of votingbehaviour in European and local elections in Britain

ANTHONY HEATH1,2?, IAIN McLEAN 1, BRIDGET TAYLOR1 &JOHN CURTICE1,3

1Nuffield College, Oxford;2The Centre for Research into Elections and Social Trends;3Strathclyde University, UK

Abstract. In Britain, both local elections and European elections can be regarded as second-order. However, voters believe that even less is at stake in European elections than in localelections, and their behaviour is congruent with this: voters are more likely to turn out in localelections, they are more likely to ‘split their ticket’; they are more likely to report that theyvote on issues specific to the second-order arena. Logistic regression of party choices in thelocal, European and national contexts confirms this. National considerations played less partin the local election and there was some evidence that voters were influenced by the record ofthe locally-incumbent party. It appears that voting in the European elections has more of anexpressive character, and is less instrumental than that in either local or national elections.

Introduction

Our aim in this paper is to compare two different sorts of second-order elec-tions, namely elections to the European Parliament and elections to localcouncils in Britain. Do voters treat these two sorts of elections in the sameway, or are there systematic and understandable differences between them?There have been major studies both of European elections (e.g. van derEijk & Franklin 1996) and of local elections (e.g. Miller 1988), but no sys-tematic comparisons between the two. Yet the predictions of the theory ofsecond-order elections can perhaps be best tested by such a comparison.

Reif & Schmitt (1980) introduced the notion of second-order nationalelections as a conceptual framework for the analysis of European electionresults:

[T]he ‘first-order’ elections in parliamentary systems are the nationalparliamentary elections. . . . There is a plethora of ‘second-order elec-tions’: by-elections, municipal elections, various sets of regional elec-tions, those to a second chamber and the like . . . . Many voterscast theirvotes in these elections not only as a result of conditions obtaining [in]

390 A. HEATH, I. McLEAN, B. TAYLOR & J. CURTICE

. . . thesecond-order arena, but also on the basis of factors in the mainpolitical arena of the nation.

They predict that second-order elections will have a lower level of par-ticipation than first-order ones; that they offer brighter prospects for smalland new political parties; and that governing parties will do badly. Perhapsmost crucially, Reif claimed that voting in the second-order elections is basedon “the political situation of the first-order arena at the moment when thesecond-order election is being held” (Reif 1985: 8). Voting in these second-order elections can be thought of as a way in which voters communicate tothe national government (and to the other political parties) their views on itscurrent performance and electoral prospects (cf. van der Eijk et al. 1996).

The theoretical rationale behind these claims is that “there is less at stakeas compared to first-order elections” (Reif 1985: 8). Since less is at stake,there is less incentive to turn out and vote; there is less need to worry aboutwhether one’s vote is wasted or not, since in a sense all votes are wastedanyway, and so one is more free to vote for minor parties that have no real-istic chance of forming the government; and there is less point in collectingor using information about the specific political arena when making one’sdecision.

Even in elections to the European Parliament, however, there is somethingat stake. The Parliament does have some powers, and there have been someefforts to increase its powers over the years in the hope of reducing the no-torious ‘democratic deficit’. Most notably the European Parliament can pass,amend or reject legislation; it scrutinizes the legislative proposals of the Com-mission, and approves jointly with the Council of Ministers the Commission’sbudgetary proposals. In theory, it can reject the budget and can even sack theCommission. (For detailed examination of the changes over time, see Smith1996.) But most of these powers are limited and highly circumscribed, and thedraconian one of sacking the Commission is too blunt an instrument exceptin exceptional circumstances. It is also rather doubtful whether the electorateis aware of these powers.

The first direct elections to the European Parliament were held simultan-eously in all member states in 1979. Since then, they have taken place atfive-yearly intervals. As suggested by Reif & Schmitt (1980), all four elec-tions have generally been marked by low turnout, by voters’ concentration onissues in their national political arenas, and by generally poor performancesby the national governing party or parties. Analysts have detected only fainttransnational movements, such as a pale Green tide in 1989 (Curtice 1989),and the uncertain emergence of a federalist versus nationalist dimension in1994 (Irwin 1995; van der Eijk et al. 1996).

BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND ORDER 391

Local elections in Britain can also be thought of as second-order elections.British local government does have some powers, but these were graduallyeroded by successive Conservative administrations, and in any event takeplace within a framework established by central government. The major re-sponsibilities of local councils are schools, roads, refuse collection, socialservices, recreation facilities, planning, and a declining stock of council hous-ing. The situation is complicated by the fact that, in 1994, some areas (themetropolitan boroughs) had single-tier authorities responsible for all theseservices, whereas other areas had two-tier authorities, each tier being respons-ible for a different set of functions. There are also numerous exceptions to thegeneral pattern (schools for example being able to ‘opt out’ of local gov-ernment control and to receive funding and supervision directly from centralgovernment), and it is important to emphasize that much of the funds forlocal government functions, as well as the main policy initiatives, come fromcentral government too.

Local government in Britain, therefore, is heavily constrained by centralgovernment both in what it can spend and how it spends it. Local govern-ment elections have been termed ‘irrelevant elections’ (Miller 1988), andthere is an earlier literature on these local elections that made many ofthe same kinds of claims that Reif and Schmitt made more systematicallyabout European elections. However, local councils do continue to have somescope for independent action and do have some responsibilities for servicedelivery, and they can therefore be thought of as intermediate between thenational Parliament and the relatively powerless European Parliament in howmuch is at stake. If the elections to the European Parliament are regarded assecond-order, then we might think of elections to local councils as ‘one andthree-quarters order’.

Many of the points made by Reif and Schmitt about European electionsalso apply, but perhaps less forcibly, to British local elections. They exhibitlower levels of participation than do national elections; small parties tend tohave better chances – the Green party and the British National party bothhaving won local election seats but never general election seats; and thenationally-governing party tends to do badly in local elections held during themiddle of their parliamentary term. As with European elections, it has beensuggested that voting behaviour will reflect the current political situation inthe first-order national arena rather than factors specific to the second-orderarena (Miller 1988; see also Cox & Laver 1979; Waller 1980). Thus Millerwrites:

The traditional view of local government elections is summed up inNewton’s phrase, ‘the annual general election’. Most analysts have as-sumed that local government election results are a largely accidental


by-product of central government’s popularity at local election time. Iflocal elections have a political message, it is assumed to be a messageaimed at central government (Miller 1988: 2).

However, Miller’s own work suggests that this traditional view is not thewhole story. He shows that for about four-fifths of voters their national andtheir local voting choices are the same, but there does seem to be one-fifthof the electorate who, in American parlance, split their ticket. For this fifth,it does seem plausible to suppose that their local votes are decided by localfactors and issues, rather than by national ones.

In this paper we aim to explore whether differences in ‘how much is atstake’ can explain differences between electoral behaviour in the two sorts ofelection. Since turnout has been thoroughly investigated by previous authorssuch as Schmitt & Mannheimer (1991) and by Miller (1988), and since ourown data are not well-suited to the analysis of turnout, we focus primarilyon the direction of partisan choice. In particular we investigate whether re-spondents’ partisan choices in the European elections owed little or nothingto European issues, whereas their choices in the local elections did owe some-thing to their perceptions and experience of local matters. In other words, aresome second-order elections more second-order than others?

The mid-term elections of 1994

The previous British general election had taken place on 9 April 1992 and hadresulted in a somewhat surprising victory for the Conservatives. Two yearslater the incumbent Conservative government wallowed in the deepest mid-term trough of unpopularity recorded up to that time. At the local elections(held on 5 May in England and Wales, and 29 April in Scotland),1 the resultswere the worst for the governing Conservatives since the current pattern ofthree-party competition began (although the Conservatives were to do stillworse in 1995). Labour was the main beneficiary, but the Liberal Democratsalso performed relatively well (as they regularly do in local elections).

The fourth direct election to the European Parliament took place on 9June. The Conservatives did not do as badly as projections from the localelection results and national opinion polls implied, but their share of the votein Great Britain slipped from the 42.6% achieved in the 1992 general electionto 28.1%; the Labour Party’s share rose from 35.0% to 44.6%.

To study these two mid-term elections we use the 1994 wave of the BritishElection Panel Study (BEPS).2 The BEPS has followed up respondents tothe 1992 British election survey, with annual rounds of interviews. The 1994round of interviews was conducted shortly after the European elections of 9


June 1994, and contained a number of questions covering both the Europeanelections and the local elections. While the use of a panel has a numberof drawbacks,3 it has the important advantage for our present purposes oflooking at individual-level change over the course of the electoral cycle.

We have a number of measures which suggest that there were indeed realdifferences in the way our panel members regarded the two sets of mid-term elections. One measure of this is the simple question “would you sayyou cared a good deal which party did best in the. . . election in Britain ordidn’t you care very much which party did best?” In the event, 45% of ourrespondents cared a good deal which party did best in the European elections,whereas 62% said they cared a good deal which party did best in the localelections and 82% in the 1992 general election.

Another is the proportion who say it makes a difference which party wins.Again, there were clear differences between the three elections: 56% (in someways a surprisingly high percentage) thought it made a difference who wonthe European elections, but this figure rose to 71% for the local elections andto 86% for the general election.4

As Reif has suggested, the underlying principle of second-order electionsis that there is less at stake as compared to first-order elections and accordingto these data, our respondents took the view that less was at stake in the 1994European and local elections than there was in the general election. On thiscriterion, however, the local elections were somewhat less second-order thanwere the European elections and, again in line with Reif’s argument, turnoutwas also somewhat higher in the local (43.4% in contested wards in Englandand Wales and 45.1% in Scotland) than in the European elections (35.9% inGreat Britain).

Moving on to the pattern of party choices, Table 1 shows very clearlythe dramatic swing against the government that took place between 1992and 1994. The European and local elections both tell much the same story,with a major swing from the Conservatives to Labour.5 However, as van derEijk & Franklin (1996: 47) argue, “To establish whether European electionshad any European component calls for a comparison of the outcome withcurrent (simultaneous) national party preferences.” We therefore collectedinformation on current vote intention. We asked respondents which politicalparty they would have been most likely to have voted for “if there had been aGeneral Election on 9 June”. This is equivalent to a mid-term opinion poll.

In order to compare like with like, we have to take account of the fact thatturnout was rather different in the European and local elections. In addition,British local elections do not take place in a representative cross-section of thecountry, and in 1994 there were in fact rather more local elections in Labour-inclined areas than in Conservative-inclined ones.6 In Table 1 therefore, we


Table 1. Comparing first and second-order political contexts

Respondents who Respondents who

voted in European voted in local

elections elections

Vote in Likely Likely

general EP national Local national

election vote vote vote vote

1992 1994 1994 1994 1994

Conservative 45.5 28.7 27.2 22.9 22.9

Labour 32.6 41.9 45.6 44.4 51.5

Liberal Democrat 19.1 21.5 23.5 26.5 21.7

Other 2.9 7.9 3.7 6.2 4.0

N (weighted) 1663 977 977 692 692

Sample:BES 1992, BEPS 1994.

directly compare like with like by looking at the vote intentions of those whoactually reported party choices in each of the two sets of mid-term elections.

Here we can see clearly that, although there was a major swing againstthe government in all three contexts, there were nonetheless some differencesbetween respondents’ choices in the two mid-term elections and their votingintentions in the national context, the disparity being greater in the case ofthe local elections. The most notable features of Table 1 are that Labour farednearly four points worse in the European elections, largely to the benefit of the‘other’ (minor) parties, than at the national level (a finding confirmed by Op-penhuis & van der Eijk 1996).7 And Labour fared seven points worse, mainlyto the benefit of the Liberal Democrats, in the local elections. It is ratherstriking, therefore, that it is not the Conservative government’s popularitythat differed between contexts but that of the various opposition parties.

Another way of presenting the same information is to look at the pro-portion whose actual mid-term vote was the same as their mid-term nationalvoting intention. In the case of the local elections, 83.0% were congruent(an identical figure to that which Miller (1988) found in his study of the1986 local elections), whereas in the case of the European elections thecorresponding figure was somewhat higher at 86.7%.

To be sure, likely vote in a hypothetical general election is not the same asactual vote in a real general election. Many of the points made about votingin second-order elections also apply to opinion polls or midterm vote inten-tions – nothing is really at stake in a mid-term opinion poll. It could well bethat we would find rather less congruence if we were able to compare the


second-order elections with a genuine, not a hypothetical, simultaneous first-order election. We can check this hypothesis from the two recent cases wherelocal elections have fallen on the same day as a general election – 1979 and1997. Individual-level data from the 1979 and 1997 British Election Surveysindicate that (of those respondents who voted in both elections) 71.3% madeidentical choices in 1979, the remaining 28.7% splitting their tickets. In 1997the corresponding figures indicate that 76.2% made identical choices in thelocal and general elections while 23.8% split their tickets.8 It is probablywise, therefore to assume that comparisons with opinion polls or measuresof hypothetical national vote will tend to underestimate the extent to whichvoters are willing to split their tickets in different contexts.

We cannot be sure from the simple fact that voters split their tickets, thatsubstantive European or local factors were the source of the splitting. Afterall, if less is at stake, voters may feel free to engage in expressive rather thanin instrumental voting and this may account for the success of minor partiesin European elections. In other words, it may not be substantive Europeanfactors that explain the success of minor parties but rather the freedom whichEuropean elections give the voter. (We return to this topic in the conclusionto this paper.) However, we did ask our respondents whether local or na-tional considerations played a larger part in their decisions. Of those whovoted in the 1994 local elections, almost equal proportions said that theyvoted ‘mostly according to what was going on in your local area’ (45%) and‘mostly according to what was going on in the country as a whole’ (42%). OurBEPS questionnaire did not ask respondents whether national or Europeanissues played a more important role in their European election vote, but theEU-wide Eurobarometer survey, in the field in April 1994, did. In the UK,twice as many respondents (63% to 31%) opted for ‘national’ as compared to‘European’ issues.9 This again suggests that context-specific processes weresomewhat more important in the local than in the European elections.

In the next two sections of the paper we go on to consider which particularcontext-specific factors were associated with the way people voted in the localand European elections of 1994, and whether these associations were in factstronger in the local elections.

Issue voting in second-order elections

Two major theories about the substantive determinants of voting choices arethose of issue-voting (see for example Himmelweit et al. 1981) and of retro-spective voting (Fiorina 1981). In this section we consider issue voting and weask whether issues specific to the second-order contexts were more importantinfluences on vote in the second-order context than they were in the national


(hypothetical general election) context. In the following section we then turnto retrospective voting.

The European elections

The general model that we use is as follows: we control for vote at the pre-vious general election. This will tend to soak up in a parsimonious fashionthe social and ideological positions that regularly divide British voters. It isimportant to recognize that, by including previous vote as an explanatoryvariable, we are effectively explaining vote change between 1992 and 1994.10

We then include measures of perceived government performance and imagewhich might tend to explain the general shift away from the Conservatives,perhaps caused by disillusion with their performance over the two-year periodsince the general election. After some exploratory analyses we selected threemeasures of government performance – their performance on taxes, the healthservice, and the general standard of living (all measured on 5-point scales).We also included three measures of party image – whether the Conservativeparty was extreme or moderate, good for one class or good for all classes, andcapable of being a strong government (all treated as binary variables).

We then included attitudes towards issues specific to the second-ordercontext. We selected the following two questions on European issues:

Do you think Britain’s long term policy should be:To leave the European Community,To stay in the EC and try to reduce its powers,To leave things as they are,To stay in the EC and try to increase its powers, or,To work for the formation of a single European government?

And here are three statements about the future of the pound in theEuropean Community. Which one comes closest to your view?Replace the pound by a single currency,Use both the pound and a new European currency in Britain,Keep the pound as the only currency in Britain.

The Conservative government had campaigned quite vigorously on itswillingness to fight for British interests within Europe, and was generallyseen by the electorate as much more inclined to protect British sovereigntyand to resist federalist tendencies than were the other main parties (Butler &Westlake 1995). The Conservatives’ position on the European currency wasmore ambivalent, but a strong minority of Conservative MPs expressed con-siderable unease about a single currency. Overall, the Conservatives wouldhave been seen as more Eurosceptic on this issue than the other parties.


It is very doubtful whether other European issues made much impact onthe campaign or would have been known to any but a tiny minority of theelectorate. As in most other areas, the electorate probably took a broad viewof the debate, seeing the Conservatives as a basically Eurosceptic party. If is-sues were to be important in the European election, then, they would probablyhave taken the form of the Conservatives winning Eurosceptic votes from theother parties, while losing Europhile votes.

In their classic analysis of issue voting, Butler & Stokes (1974) emphas-ized three conditions that they felt must be satisfied if issue-voting is tohave an effect:. the voters must be unevenly divided on the issue; they mustregard the issue as salient; and they must perceive differences between thepolitical parties in their stances on the issue. We collected information on allthree aspects in the course of the BEPS, and all three conditions appearedto be satisfied. In particular our respondents correctly identified quite majordifferences between the parties on a scale measuring support for Europeanintegration, seeing the Conservatives as considerably more Eurosceptic thanLabour and, correctly, perceiving the Liberal Democrats as the most Euro-phile of the three main parties.11 Moreover the respondents were unevenlydivided, the average respondent actually holding a more Eurosceptic viewthan the Conservative party. There was thus some potential for the Conser-vatives to gain votes on this issue. It is less clear how salient the issue was tothe voters. In general British voters tend to be more concerned about domesticissues than foreign policy ones, but it is likely that there was at least a minorityof voters who were seriously concerned about European integration.12

The conditions necessary for issue voting in the European elections werethus in place. But did they actually take effect? To explore this question wecompare two logistic regressions in which, as described above, party choiceis modelled as a function of previous vote, of perceived performance, ofthe image of the ruling Conservative party, and of attitudes towards the twoEuropean issues described above. In the first model our dependent variable isparty choice (Conservative versus non-Conservative) in the European electionand in the second model it is party choice in a hypothetical general electionheld on the same date.13 Note that by including the European issues in thesecond model, we allow for the possibility that the second-order issues mayhave had an impact on the first-order party choice. There is no reason inprinciple to suppose that effects can work only in one direction, and given theheightened prominence which the European election campaign had given toEuropean issues, it is not implausible that voters will have been influenced bythese in the first-order context too.14

The main story told by Table 2 is that previous vote and party imagewere the dominant influences on mid-term support for the government. These


Table 2. Explaining support for the Conservatives in European and nationalcontexts

Logistic regression parameter estimates

EP vote Likely national

1994 vote 1994

Attitudes towards

leaving EU 0.21 (0.11) 0.27(0.13)

keeping pound 0.14 (0.17) 0.25 (0.20)

Evaluation of government record on

taxes −0.02 (0.17) 0.14 (0.19)

standards in the NHS −0.39(0.12) −0.49(0.14)

general standard of living −0.22 (0.15) −0.14 (0.18)

Perception of Conservatives as

extreme −1.55(0.30) −1.39(0.34)

good for one class −1.39(0.27) −2.29(0.32)

capable 0.62(0.26) 1.06(0.29)

Vote in 1992

Labour −4.67(0.75) −4.53(0 76)

Other −2.57(0.30) −3.05(0.37)

Constant 2.68 (0.94) 2.37 (1.08)

Model improvement 686.9 741.2

(10 df) (10 df)

N (weighted) 952 926

Note: significant parameters are in bold. Standard errors are given in brackets. Theomitted category for 1992 vote is Conservative.Sample: BEPS 1994, respondents who reported that they voted in the Europeanelections.

variables had highly significant effects on party choice both in the Europeanelection and in the national context. Interestingly, retrospective judgements ofthe economy do not appear to have had any impact, net of the other variablesin the model, whereas the government’s record on the National Health Servicewas significant in both cases.

Turning to the European issues, neither of our two items reach statist-ical significance in the model for the European election, although in thesecond, national context, model attitudes towards the EU do reach conven-tional levels of statistical significance. In both cases the signs are in the rightdirection, with anti-integrationist attitudes being associated with support forthe Conservatives.


We should not make too much of the fact that attitudes towards the EUreach significance in one model but not in the other. The parameter estimatesare of broadly similar magnitude in the two models and in both cases arequite close to the 0.05 level of significance (albeit falling slightly below inone case and slightly above in the other). It might be best to be somewhattentative in the conclusions one draws. In diminishing order of certainty wecan conclude that, in both models, vote-switching between 1992 and 1994was dominated by national considerations rather than by factors specific tothe second-order context; that European issues had much the same impact inthe national and European contexts, and that, in both contexts, there may havebeen some influence of Europe on vote-switching between 1992 and 1994.15

We need to repeat these analyses for divisions within the opposition partiessince, as Table 1 showed, it was the fortunes of Labour and the minor partieswhich differed most across contexts. In Table 3 our dependent variable be-comes support for the Labour party (Labour versus non-Labour) while theexplanatory variables are the same as in Table 2. However, when we fit themodels to Labour voting, much the same story emerges: previous vote andparty image dominate the models both for the European election and for ahypothetical general election.

In general the parameter estimates are rather smaller for Labour voting inTable 3 than they were for Conservative voting in Table 2 (which is perhapsnot surprising since divisions between the various opposition parties will nodoubt depend partly on the images of those parties as well as on the charac-teristics of the governing party that are included in the model). It is notablehowever that attitudes towards the EU did have a significant effect (and withthe predicted sign) on Labour voting in the European election although onceagain the parameter is of broadly similar magnitude to that found in thenational context.

The clear message from these analyses, therefore, is how similar the influ-ences on vote were in the two contexts. It is previous vote and Conservativeparty image that dominate both models, and in both models the parametersare very similar. To be sure, given the extent of congruence between voting inEuropean elections and likely vote in a general election, it is to be expectedthat the parameter estimates for the two sets of models would be quite similar.However, when we turn to the local elections we will see that the results candiffer between first and second-order contexts.

The local elections

There will have been many issues (particularly to do with planning and theenvironment) specific to particular local authorities, and a national survey ofour kind could not hope to capture these. However, there was one general is-


Table 3. Explaining support for Labour in European and national contexts


EP vote 1994 Likely national vote 1994

Attitudes towards

leaving EU −0.19(0.09) −0.12 (0.09)

keeping pound 0.02 (0.14) −0.04 (0.13)


taxes −0.04 (0.13) −0.08 (0.13)

standards in the NHS 0.13 (0.10) 0.14 (0.12)

general standard of living 0.16 (0.12) 0.14 (0.12)


extreme 0.85(0.21) 0.84(0.21)

good for one class 1.49(0.39) 1.41(0.36)

capable −0.46 (0.24) −0.43 (0.24)

Vote in 1992

Labour 3.80(0.28) 3.60(0.28)

Other 0.54(0.26) 0.29 (0.25)

Constant −3.87 (0.79) −3.53 (0.78)


(10 df) (10 df)


Note: significant parameters are in bold. Standard errors are given in brackets. Theomitted category for 1992 vote is Conservative.Sample: BEPS 1994, respondents who reported that they voted in the Europeanelections.

sue which was perhaps equivalent to the questions on Europe that we includedin the previous section: Conservative governments had gradually eroded thepowers of local authorities, particularly through their policy of ‘capping’ localtaxation, and this had become a major source of dispute between the parties.16

To tap this issue we asked respondents:

Do you think that local councils ought to be controlled by centralgovernment more, less or about the same as now?

This question on control of local government, therefore, is probably theclosest equivalent at the local level to the broad division between the partieson the European question. It is perhaps questionable how salient this was as anissue in the 1994 local elections, although most voters were probably awarethat the Conservatives favoured central control over local authority expendit-


Table 4. Explaining support for the Conservatives in local and national contexts


Local vote 1994 Likely national vote 1994

Attitudes towards

control of LAs 0.41 (0.22) 0.44 (0.28)


taxes 0.06 (0.19) −0.17 (0.23)

standards in the NHS −0.34(0.14) −0.52(0.17)

general standard of living −0.13 (0.18) 0.09 (0.23)


extreme −0.79(0.34) −1.55(0.44)

good for one class −0.99(0.32) −2.20(0.37)

capable 0.92(0.30) 1.23(0.37)

Vote in 1992

Labour −4.75(0.88) −4.81(1.00)

Other −2.61(0.39) −2.67(0.44)

Constant 1.11 (1.09) 2.50 (1.34)


(9 df) (9 df)


Note: significant parameters are in bold. Standard errors are given in brackets. The omit-ted category for 1992 vote is Conservative.Sample: BEPS 1994. respondents who reported that they voted in their local councilelections.

ure and decisions.17 In principle, therefore, the conditions for issue-voting onthe basis of general issues of this sort may not have been satisfied.

Given the mixed evidence on issue-voting within the European context, wewere not hopeful of finding country-wide issue-voting within the somewhatless favourable circumstances of the local elections. Nevertheless, models oflocal election choice, comparable to the European models reported in Table2, are not without interest. In particular, did national considerations operatewith the same force at the local level as they did at the European one?

Table 4, like Tables 2 and 3, strongly suggests that national factors are themajor ones that influence voting in local elections. As before, the dominantforces, both in the local elections and in the national context, were previousvote and party image. Unlike Tables 2 and 3, however we now find that thereis a substantial difference in the size of the party image parameters in thelocal and national contexts. Perceptions of the Conservative party as extreme


and as good for one class were much less influential in the local context, theparameters being reduced to half the level they display in the national context.Given the extent of congruence in actual voting patterns in the two contexts,this is by no means a trivial reduction.18

Table 4 is also rather similar to Tables 2 and 3 in suggesting that issuesconnected with the second-order context, specifically the issue of whetherthere should be central government control of local councils, may havesome role in explaining vote switching between 1992 and 1994. Once againthe parameter estimates are of borderline statistical significance and are ofbroadly similar magnitude in the local and national contexts.

Again we need to check for the choices between the opposition parties.Since it was the Liberal Democrats who diverged most strongly in their localand national performances, we model their support in the local elections.We follow the same strategy as before: our dependent variable becomes sup-port for the Liberal Democrats (versus support for any other party) and ourexplanatory variables remain unchanged.

Table 5 tells a story that is substantially different from any that we haveseen so far. Liberal Democrat voting in the local elections was scarcely relatedto the performance or image of the national government, but was unambigu-ously related to the issue of central government control of local councils. TheLiberal Democrats have been particularly keen to promote local autonomyin running local affairs, and in the light of this evidence it seems reasonableto suppose that their strong showing in local elections may be related to theirstance on this issue. To be sure, the parameter for this issue is not all that muchhigher in the local context than in the national context, but further checksconfirmed that control of local councils was more strongly related to supportfor the Liberal Democrats in the local elections than it was either in nationalor in European contexts.19

Retrospective voting in second-order elections

The key idea in the theory of retrospective voting is that voters make theirchoices on the basis of what life has been like under the incumbent gov-ernment (Fiorina 1981). Fiorina argues that the government’s past record inoffice, rather than its policy promises for the future, provides the rational voterwith a more reliable (and free) source of information about its likely futureperformance. Moreover, the government’s record can include not only theperformance of the economy but also any other outputs of which the citizenhas experience – such as public health care or education

Retrospective voting cannot really apply to the European Parliament sincethere is little, if any, feedback to the electorate on the performance of what


Table 5. Explaining support for the Liberal Democrats in local and national contexts


Local vote 1994 Likely national vote 1994

Attitudes towards

control of LAs −0.45(0.16) −0.35 (0.18)


taxes −0.35(0.13) −0.11 (0.15)

standards in the NHS −0.02 (0.10) 0.12 (0.12)

general standard of living −0.09 (0.12) −0.26 (0.14)


extreme −0.07 (0.22) 0.06 (0.44)

good for one class 0.31 (0.29) 1.20(0.34)

capable −0.35 (0.23) 0.03 (0.26)

Vote in 1992

Labour −1.24(0.29) −2.07(0.35)

Other 1.13(0.25) 0.90 (0.26)

Constant 0.73 (0.80) 2.50 (1.34)


(9 df) (9 df)


Note: significant parameters are in bold. Standard errors are given in brackets. The omit-ted category for 1992 vote is Conservative.Sample: BEPS 1994, respondents who reported that they voted in their local councilelections.

might be termed the incumbent political grouping within the Parliament. In-deed, it is unlikely that many members of the British electorate know whichare the dominant groupings within the European Parliament and to which ofthem the main British parties belong.20 Without this knowledge, it is hardlypossible to have retrospective voting, or indeed any genuine accountability ofthe EP to its electorate.21

However, the conditions required for retrospective voting in local electionsdo hold. Crucially our respondents appeared to be reasonably knowledgeableabout which party or parties was in control of their local council. If our re-spondents had frequently been mistaken as to who controlled their council,this would have cast some doubt on notions of retrospective voting. However,our checks indicated that 72% of those who faced local elections correctlyidentified the party or parties that controlled the council in question, andonly 4% believed that a council was Labour-controlled when it was actually


Conservative-controlled or vice versa.22 Hence the minimal conditions forretrospective voting do appear to have been in place.

Respondents also have some feedback on what life has been like (not leastwhat their council tax has been like) under the incumbent local administra-tion. One aim of the Conservatives’ reforms of local taxation had been tomake local councils more accountable and ‘Conservative Councils Cost YouLess’ was a major Conservative slogan during the 1994 election campaign.Moreover, this claim was factually true: Conservative councils did indeed costlocal taxpayers substantially less, with the band D tax rate (the standard oneused in comparison between local authorities) being £540 in Conservative-controlled councils compared with £601 in Liberal Democrat and £619 inLabour-controlled councils There is some evidence from our panel that re-spondents were indeed aware of these differences (see McLean et al. 1996).If voters were indeed voting retrospectively on the basis of local performance,rather than expressing a judgement about the national government, then wemight expect these tax burdens, or perceptions of them, to be a crucial factor.

We therefore ask whether Conservative councils gained votes, or at leastavoided losing votes, as a result of the reduced tax burden which their votersenjoyed. Did Labour underperform in the local elections because voters pun-ished Labour-controlled councils for their perceived profligacy and thus gavethem fewer votes than the national tide would have given on its own?23

To answer these questions we proceed in basically the same way as wedid with issue voting, modelling party choice as a function of vote at theprevious general election, perceived government performance and party im-age, together with measures of retrospective local voting.24 To measure theperceived profligacy (or otherwise) of the local council we use the question:

And thinking about the level of the council tax in your area do you thinkit gives good value or poor value for money?

To test for local retrospective voting we then have to include an interactionterm between this item and the political complexion of the incumbent localadministration. We can accomplish this by constructing a combined variablewhich incorporates both the identity of the party in control and its perceivedvalue for money. The model is thus in essence the same as that used in Tables4 and 5, with the addition of the interaction between value-for-money andincumbency at the local level.

In Table 6 we report the results of three logistic regressions. In the first one(reported in the first column) our dependent variable is whether respondentsvoted Conservative or not in the 1994 local elections, while the other twocolumns cover Labour and Liberal Democrat voting respectively. To save


Table 6. Retrospective voting in the 1994 local elections


Con vs nonCon Lab vs nonLab LD vs nonLD

Conservative control

good value 0 0 0

neither −1.05 (0.65) 0.70 (0.8) 0.01 (0.52)

poor value −1.16 (0.72) 1.46(0.62) −0.42 (0.54)

Labour control

good value −1.53(0.54) 1.35(0.47) −0.66 (0.39)

neither −0.93 (0.63) 1.07(0.53) −0.44 (0.45)

poor value −0.93 (0.52) 0.96(0.48) −0.30 (0.39)

Liberal Democrat control

good value −2.36(0.81) −0.85 (0.77) 1.49(0.52)

neither −3.33(1.51) −0.31 (0.76) 1.81(0.63)

poor value −1.92 (1.10) −0.51 (1.01) 1.39 (0.73)

Model improvement 348.1 (17 df) 352.6 (17 df) 135.6 (17 df)

N 735 735 735

Note: significant parameters are in bold. Standard errors are given in brackets.Sample: BEPS 1994 respondents who reported voted in their local council elections.

space, we do not display the parameters for the control variables, which arebasically unchanged from those in Tables 4 and 5.

Our main interest is in our new variable which incorporates respondents’perceptions of the value-for-money given by the party they believed to bein control of their local council prior to the local elections. We take as ourreference category people who believed that the Conservatives had been incontrol of their local council and that their local council tax offered goodvalue for money. We can see from column 1 that none of the other groupsof respondents were significantly more likely to vote Conservative than thisreference group. We can also see that there are significant negative parameterswhere an incumbent Labour or Liberal Democrat council was perceived tooffer good value for money.

In the second column, explaining support for Labour, we find a numberof significant value-for-money parameters, Labour gaining votes when theConservatives offered poor value for money or where Labour had been theincumbents. In the latter case, differences in the perceived value for moneyfrom the Labour council did not seem to make much difference, althoughthe parameter is rather smaller when Labour councils were perceived to offerpoor value.


Finally, in the third column, reporting the analysis of Liberal Demo-crat voting, we find two statistically significant parameters where LiberalDemocrat councils were perceived to offer good or average value for money.

The overall pattern, therefore, does suggest that voters rewarded incum-bent councils for their perceived value-for-money. To be sure, the incumbencyeffect is rather clearer than the value-for-money effect, but the pattern of theparameters is consistent with the hypothesis that voters were evaluating therecords of their local councils.25

Discussion

Overall our results provide considerable support for Schmitt and Reif’s theoryof second-order elections. We have found that many of their propositionsapply not only to the case of European elections for which they were firstdesigned, but also apply, albeit with less force, to the British local electionsas well. Moreover, the differences between the two sets of second-order elec-tions are exactly those that would be expected from how much is at stake.Somewhat more is at stake in British local elections, and accordingly thelocal elections have less of a second-order character than do the Europeanelections: more of our respondents turned out to vote in the local elections,more of them felt that it made a difference who won, and fewer reported thatthey voted on the basis of national issues. Our regression analyses confirmedthat national considerations played a smaller part in their vote decisions anddid show some evidence for the role of local factors, notably of incumbencyand value for money. A single general framework, therefore, can encompassboth sorts of election.

Our data also provide some support for a further claim that Reif makes. Hesuggests that voters ‘vote with the heart’ in these elections, since there is noprospect of any of the parties being called upon to form the government. Thevote may thus have rather less of an instrumental character and may be moreexpressive than that in a first-order election. Again, this makes theoreticalsense: since less is at stake, voters will be less likely to adopt an instrumentalapproach to their partisan choices.

There is some evidence to support this interpretation. One implication ofthe theory is that there will be less strategic or instrumental tactical votingin the second-order elections since the ‘wasted vote’ argument that usuallyapplies to small parties who have no chance of forming the government be-comes irrelevant. In essence, the wasted vote argument applies to smallerparties that have little chance of winning in a particular constituency. Theinstrumental supporter of such a small party may therefore vote for his orher second-choice party in order to prevent some third, disliked, party from


winning the seat. As our measure of instrumental tactical voting we use theresponse “I really preferred another party, but it had no chance of winning inthis constituency” (Heath & Evans 1994). Our data confirm that instrumentaltactical voting was lowest in the European elections at 2.8% compared with4.8% in the local elections and 9.0% in the 1992 general election. Moreover,it was indeed the same minor parties who had been disadvantaged by tacticalvoting in the general election of 1992 who performed better-than-expected inthe 1994 European elections.

A rather different argument from Reif has been put forward by van derEijk and his colleagues (1996), who have suggested that voters use thesesecond-order elections to communicate to the political parties. They termthis expressive tactical voting.26 In some respects this may be the oppos-ite to Reif’s interpretation: people may feel free to vote in a second-orderelection for a party that they do not in their hearts support but may insteaduse their vote to warn their own party to mend its ways. For example, theso-called green tide of 1989 may not have been because people ‘in theirhearts’ preferred the Greens but perhaps because people wished to tell theirnormal parties to listen to the green message. Both Reif and van der Eijk andFranklin, however, agree in seeing voting in the second-order elections as es-sentially expressive rather than instrumental, and both therefore are consistentwith the central notion that less is at stake.

Qualitative research may well be the best way of deciding between thesealternative interpretations of the meaning of votes in second-order elections.However, we have some data in the BEPS that is relevant. We asked thoserespondents who had switched votes between the 1992 general election andthe 1994 European election why they had done so. We asked them how mucheach of the following statements explained why they had voted differently inthe European and general elections:

At heart, you haven’t changed your party, but you wanted to show youwere fed up with them this time.At heart, you have changed your party to the one you voted for this time.At heart, you have always been a supporter of the party you voted forthis time.You voted differently this time because you were voting about Europe.

Respondents were asked whether the four statements applied a lot or alittle. Analogous questions were not asked about the local elections 1994,largely because of space constraints in the questionnaire, but they wereincluded in the 1995 round of BEPS.

The first of these statements can be thought of as a ‘protest voting’ ac-count and has perhaps most in common with van der Eijk and Franklin’s


Table 7. The meaning of vote switching in the European and localelections

% Saying that the statement ‘explains a lot’

why they had switched votes

1994 1995

European local

elections elections

At heart, haven’t 35.3 26.1

changed party

At heart, have changed

party to the one voted 24.8 15.6

for this time

At heart, have always

supported the party 15.9 6.2

voted for this time

Voted differently

because about 34.7 47.6

Europe/local issues

N 213 206

Sample: BEPS 1994, 1995.

theory of expressive tactical voting. The second two explanations have morein common with Reif’s theory of voting with the heart for the party one reallyprefers, while the final explanation is clearly a context-specific one and hasa more instrumental character. Respondents could of course give more thanone of these explanations.

Both in the 1994 European elections and the 1995 local elections the mostpopular explanations for vote-switching were the first and the last – the protestvoting and the context-specific ones. Voting with the heart was a somewhatless popular explanation, though many voters did accept that it played a partin their decisions, and more so in the European elections than in the fol-lowing year’s local elections. This offers some support to Reif’s thesis that‘voting with the heart’ might explain the success of small parties in Europeanelections. Van der Eijk and Franklin’s theory of expressive tactical voting,however, receives even more support.

Comparing the two sorts of elections, we find, as expected, that the fourth,instrumental, account was offered much more often in the context of thelocal elections. More interestingly, we also find that our respondents offered


a greater number and variety of accounts for their vote-switching in theEuropean elections. In the local elections, the fourth account dominated:nearly half our respondents said that it applied a lot, and there were relativelyfew respondents who offered any of the other alternatives. In the case of theEuropean elections, however, respondents’ accounts were much more evenlyspread across the four options.

This variety of motivations may itself be a consequence of the fact that lessis at stake. Voters may feel free to express any of a variety of feelings throughthe ballot box when little is at stake. In this respect, then, we may need tomodify Reif’s theory of second-order elections: while “the political situationof the first-order arena at the moment when the second-order election is beingheld” (Reif 1985: 8) may be the predominant factor that influences votersin the second-order election, it is not the only one. As we have seen, 13%of British voters split their tickets in the European elections, and for thesepeople at least national considerations would not appear to have been decis-ive. Moreover, we have not been able to find specifically European issues orfactors to account for these split-tickets. To be sure, this may reflect our lackof ingenuity in designing appropriate European questions, but our preferredinterpretation of these results is that many of these voters felt freed from theusual instrumental considerations that apply in first-order national electionsor in the one-and-three-quarter order local elections. Expressive voting thathad little to do either with the substantive European or national issues couldthus freely take place.

Acknowledgements

This research has been made possible by the ESRC, through its support for theCentre for Research into Elections and Social Trends (CREST). We are verygrateful to our colleagues in CREST for their help and support. We wouldalso like to thank Julie Smith, the Editor and the anonymous referees for theirhelpful comments.

Notes

1. All the metropolitan areas in England, including London, and the whole of Scotland hadan election. Most of Wales did not (4 councils out of 37 had an election). In Englandoutside the metropolitan conurbations, a minority of authorities (114 out of 296) heldelections. However, as those authorities with elections tended to be the more urbanisedand populous ones, it is probably the case that the majority of the electorate in the Englishnon-metropolitan counties faced a local election. 1129 out of 1859 respondents in the1994 panel (60.7%) believed that there was a local election in their area.


2. Of the original 3534 respondents to the 1992 BES, 13.5% said that they were unwilling toto be reinterviewed. As many as possible of the remaining 3057 were contacted by post in1993 and by face-to-face interview in 1994. Altogether 2622 usable questionnaires werereturned in 1993 and 2277 interviews were achieved in 1994. For analysis of the natureof the attrition see Taylor et al. (1996). The original 1992 BES oversampled in Scotlandin order to enable a detailed study to be undertaken of Scottish voting behaviour. In orderto adjust for this oversampling, the sample has been weighted.

3. The panel study necessarily omits new voters who came of age after the previous GeneralElection, and it is therefore not fully representative of the eligible electorate. More im-portantly, the panel suffers from differential attrition, which is particularly marked amongnon-voters and those less interested in politics. It is not therefore a good vehicle for study-ing turnout (particularly when compounded with the initial response bias by nonvoters).However, our checks against external data suggest that in other respects the attrition hasnot led to marked biases. Providing that there is no ‘informative dropout’, these biases canbe corrected by weighting, but since we are primarily interested in relationships betweenvariables, rather than in population estimates, we have not weighted the panel data (exceptin order to downweight the Scots who were deliberately oversampled in the initial BESof 1992).

4. The data on how much the respondent cared about the General Election are those collectedin 1992. However, the data on how much difference a General Election makes comes fromthe 1994 wave of interviews, since this question was not asked in 1992.

5. We must remember that the large swing to Labour does not necessarily mean that manyvoters switched directly from the Conservatives to Labour. In practice, if we constructvote transition matrices between 1992 and 1994 we find that around half the swing can beaccounted for by differential turnout, and another quarter by movements to and from theminor parties. Only around a quarter is to be explained by direct switching. See Heath etal. (1995) for further details.

6. Elections to local councils take place on a fixed cycle unlike British general electionswhere the incumbent government decides on the timing of the election. In any one yearonly a proportion of authorities will have elections. However, the proportion that doeshave elections will not necessarily be a representative cross-section of the country.

7. Oppenhuis & van der Eijk (1996) show in table C17 that ‘quasi-switching’ (that is switch-ing between the European election and a hypothetical general election held at the sametime) was to the benefit of the Greens and other small parties and to the detriment ofLabour.

8. We should note that in 1979 about 10% of the local voters voted for Independent orRatepayer candidates (which have no equivalent at the national level). The number of In-dependents and Ratepayers contesting local elections (the latter often being Conservativesunder another name) has since declined. This change probably accounts for much of thedifference between the 1979 and 1997 figures.

9. Source: Eurobarometer 41, 1994, fig. 1.5.10. It should be noted that voting in British General Elections does seem to be associated

with attitudes towards Europe (Heath et al. 1991, table 3.4). However, by focussing onvote change we are in effect asking whether attitudes towards Europe led people to votedifferently in the European Election from the way they had voted in the previous GeneralElection.

11. In both the 1992 and 1994 rounds of BEPS respondents were asked to place themselvesand the parties on an eleven-point scale. The endpoints of the scale were “Britain should


do all it can to unite fully with the European Community” and, at the Eurosceptic extreme“Britain should do all it can to protect its independence from the European Community”.In the 1994 BEPS wave the average position, as perceived by the respondents, of theConservative party on this scale was 6.1 (s.d. 3.1), of the Labour party was 4.9 (s.d.2.7) and of the Liberal Democrat party was 4.7 (s.d. 2.5). The average position of therespondents themselves was 6.5 (s.d. 3.4).

12. Unfortunately respondents in the 1994 wave of BEPS were not asked how important theissues were. They had been asked in the 1992 survey, and at that time 5% said Europewas extremely important in deciding how to vote and 46% said it was important.

13. In order to compare like with like, as explained earlier, we restrict our analyses in Table2 to respondents who voted in the European Election. Given the modest degree of in-congruence between voters’ choices in the two contexts, the two regressions necessarilycover somewhat different subsets of respondents, but the major selection bias arising fromnon-voting in the European elections is avoided.

14. Talk of ‘influence’ on the basis of regression analysis is of course always somewhatsuspect. We cannot be sure in which direction causation runs. Thus attitudes towardsthe issues may be acting as a proxy for unmeasured aspects of partisanship. As partyidentification theory emphasizes, partisanship may influence issue position rather thanthe other way round, and while we have controlled for previous vote we can never besure that we have taken full account of partisanship. However, failure to find a significantparameter estimate associated with attitudes towards a particular issue will tend to makeus more sceptical about the existence of any causal influence of that attitude. Conversely,while a significant parameter estimate will not prove causality, it does at least suggest thatthe hypothesis of a causal influence may be worth pursuing further.

15. These results are not dissimilar from those reported in Franklin & Curtice (1996). Franklin& Curtice were of course dealing with a different set of European Elections, namelythe 1989 elections. They did not control for previous vote (since they did not have apanel study), and their model, unlike ours, is not therefore concerned with vote switching.However, they included a range of measures of ideological position which are likely toperform much the same function as previous vote does in our model. They do not reportanalyses for likely vote in a hypothetical general election.

16. Another major issue that had been partly responsible for Mrs Thatcher’s fall had beenthe poll tax, which had replaced rates as the method of raising local taxation. However,this had in turn been replaced by the council tax, a progressive tax, by John Major’s firstadministration before the 1992 general election and was no longer an issue in 1994. SeeSmith & McLean (1994) for an account of the poll tax’s importance in the 1992 generalelection.

17. We did not ask questions comparable to those on Europe about perceived party positionson control of local government. However, from respondents’ answers about their ownposition on control of local government, it is clear that Conservative supporters weremore inclined to favour central control while Labour and Liberal Democrat supporterswere more inclined to favour local autonomy. It is quite likely that many respondentswere aware that their own position was relatively close to their party’s position.

18. Since the Ns involved in Table 4 are substantially lower than those in Table 2, there isclearly the risk that the difference in results is due to the change in sample size. However,when we replicate the analyses using the same (reduced) sample, the conclusions we drawin the text are unscathed. We have also replicated the analyses reported in Tables 2 to 5


including bothattitudes towards Europeandattitudes towards local issues but again theresults do not affect our conclusions in the text.

19. We carried out two sorts of checks. First we included both the European and the localissues in analyses of Liberal Democrat support in local and European elections. Theseanalyses showed that control of local authorities did not have a significant effect onLiberal Democrat support in the European context (parameter estimate−0.08 with sd0.14), but continued to have a powerful effect on LD support in the local context evenafter controlling for attitudes towards Europe (parameter estimate 0.45 with sd 0.15).Second, we carried out analyses of ‘quasi-switching’. That is we replicated the modelsreported in Table 5 but substituted likely national vote in 1994 for actual vote in 1992 as acontrol variable. The models thus attempt to explain ‘switching’ between the hypothetical1994 general election and the actual mid-term election. The results show that attitudesto control of local authorities had a significant effect on quasi-switching to the LiberalDemocrats in the local context (parameter estimate−0.46 with sd 0.19) but not in theEuropean context (parameter estimate−0.04 with sd 0.19).

20. In fact the largest grouping in the European Parliament in the 1989–94 period was theSocialist Group, to which Labour belonged. The Conservatives had originally formed arather small bloc termed the European Democratic Group but in 1992 they became alliedmembers of the European People’s Party, the second-largest group (largely of ChristianDemocrats) within the Parliament. However, since there appears to be considerable co-operation between these two main groupings, it is doubtful if British voters’ conceptionsof accountability would apply. See Butler & Westlake, 1995 for further details.

21. Retrospective voting of a somewhat different sort could occur in the European elections:voters might reward the incumbent. national government for its performance in securingbenefits from the Commission although of course this kind of retrospective voting wouldbe more logical in a national election, when it is the fate of the incumbent governmentthat is being decided.

22. In many cases no one party had overall control. This could account for some of respond-ents’ errors. We would also on theoretical grounds expect that ‘hung councils’ wherethere was no overall control would reduce the extent to which voters could or would voteretrospectively.

23. We also obtained information on respondents’ evaluations of their local council’s recordon specific functions such as street and pavement repairs, rubbish collection and controlof local traffic. Respondents appeared to have a reasonable understanding of the extentof local responsibility, and their judgements of the local council’s record were stronglyrelated to their perceptions of ‘value for money’. See McLean et al. 1996 for details.

24. The Ns for these regressions are somewhat reduced from those reported in Table 5, sincethere are missing values on the measure of local party control.

25. We need to be careful in interpreting the apparent ‘incumbency effects’. It is of coursepossible that these are due to omitted variables: for example there may be contextualvariables such as the proportion of the local area that is working class, which explain bothwhy Labour was in control and why, other things being equal, voters were more inclinedto support Labour.

26. For discussion of the distinction between instrumental and expressive tactical voting seeFranklin et al. (1994) and Heath & Evans (1994).


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