To change or not to change? Individual-level voting motives across Belgian national and local elections

Local elections are central to democratic life, as they determine who manages essential services that shape people’s daily lives. Understanding what drives local vote choice is therefore key to assessing the responsiveness of local democracy. According to the second-order elections theory, local elections are perceived as less important and are largely shaped by national politics, with party identification and ideological orientations determining local vote choice. While previous studies have examined second-order dynamics through aggregate outcomes such as election results, these approaches neglect voters’ motivations. Other research has mapped local voting motives, but without analysing to which extent motives remain consistent between first-order elections and municipal elections at the individual level. The paper addresses these gaps by analysing four waves of the BelREP 2024 panel survey, collected around Belgium’s 2024 closely timed federal and local elections, to compare open-ended responses on voting motives before and after each election. By tracking individual-level changes in reasoning we assess whether national political considerations shape local vote choice, and among which groups of voters these motives are most pronounced. We expect politically sophisticated voters and those that identify more strongly with their municipality to be less likely to express a second-order justification.