Voter Behaviour

How do party organizational and party system linkages help us understand how voters treat multi-level contexts? It is commonly argued that federal contexts disrupt the accountability mechanism. Do certain institutional designs of federalism affect this? Institutional designs that maximize the autonomy of each level of government should preserve the clarity of responsibility more than institutional designs that create a high degree of interdependence between levels of government. The existence of other forms of political linkage, at the party organizational and party system level, should also affect the emergence of linked political behaviour. This chapter tests whether this prediction holds using aggregate-level electoral data to identify barometer voting and subnational economic voting effects across seven multi-level systems. It then uses individual-level data to more closely examine how and when partisanship serves as a linkage mechanism in the case of Canada.