Electoral strategies in multilevel systems: the effect of national politics on regional elections

Elections are at the heart of representative democracies. Whereas the study of national elections is a prominent field in comparative politics, we still know little about subnational political actors' behaviour. We seek to close this gap by applying a dictionary coding approach to analyse parties' issue-based content of 743 subnational manifestos in Austria and Germany. We show that subnational parties emphasize regional topics less if regional elections happen close to national elections but focus more on both regional and mixed topics if their national party organization is in government. This has important implications for electoral competition in multilevel systems.