Party Labeling in Local Elections: The Effect of National Partisan Tide in a Partycratic Political System

The topic of party labeling is nothing new in political science. However, to date, few is known about this practice at the local level. In particular, we do not know why some candidates decide to adopt the national party label while others prefer to run as independent candidates. To gain further and more detailed insight on this practice, this paper proposes a valence-based model of party labeling in local elections and tests its empirical implications using an original dataset of the usage of party labels in the 2012 Belgian local elections. Belgium is an interesting case-study since it is often designated as an ideal-typical partycratic system where political parties and party leaders are at the center of democratic chain of accountability and oers very pre- cise measurements of the partisan aliation of local candidates. Evidence gives support to this model and shows, among other implications, that the adoption by local candidates of the national party label is explained by their willingness to increase their vote share based on the information provided by national partisan tides.