Electoral Externalities in Federations.

This paper is the first step in a larger empirical research project that sets out to understand cross-national, cross-party, and diachronic variations in the incentives created for subnational politicians by the behavior of voters in lower-tier elections. In the process, we hope to shed light on more basic questions about what voters are trying to accomplish when casting ballots in subnational elections, though in this endeavor we are limited by ecological inference problems associated with the use of aggregate data. This paper uses data on elections and economic outcomes in several federations, seeking to determine the degree to which regional executives are held accountable for regional versus national outcomes, how those lines of accountability are mediated by partisan relations across levels of government, and more generally, the extent to which the success of regional incumbents is linked with that of their national-level co-partisans. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]