Connecting Niche Party Vote Change in First-and Second-Order Elections

Niche parties in European countries have struggled to win seats in national legislatures. Accounts of niche party development describe how attempts to win these seats often begin with second-order election campaigns for the European Parliament (EP) or a regional assembly. Strong second-order campaigns can signal that a party is locally competitive, which will help niche parties by reducing defections due to strategic voting in later first-order elections. In this paper, I argue that according to such accounts, improvements in secondorder election results should be correlated with subsequent improvements in first-order election results in any given constituency. I also argue that the magnitude of this correlation can be compared across different types of second-order elections, to gauge how credible voters perceive these second-order signals of local viability to be. I find that only regional assembly election results, not EP election results, are consistently and statistically significantly correlated with national election results. This suggests that niche parties can only build their support through bottom-up rather than top-down means, and that EP election results cannot be used to predict how niche parties will perform at national elections.