Towards a scholarship on regional elections INTRODUCTION

This introduction article inaugurates the first annual special issue on regional elections which sets out to nurture a community of regional election scholars who seek to understand the factors driving regional voters, regional election outcomes, and regional electoral dynamics across the globe. This is a much-needed research effort given that the territorial scope and importance of regional elections have increased considerably over the past four decades yet most scholarship remains focused on national elections. Collectively the articles and reports presented in this first special issue enable us to distil three contributions to the scholarship on regional elections: a refinement on the scope conditions of the second-order election model; the introduction of the concept of barometer elections; and the insight that each regional (and national) election is regionalized or nationalized to a certain extent, either in outcome and/or in relation to the processes that sustain the outcome.