The nationalization of electoral change in the Americas

This paper examines the nationalization of electoral change in multiparty settings. We present a method to measure the relative magnitude of national and sub-national shifts in electoral support across parties and elections that is appropriate for the compositional structure of multiparty electoral data. We apply this new method to the analysis of legislative elections in six Latin American countries and the United States. Our findings indicate the widespread influence of local (i.e., state-specific) factors in electoral change, but highlight the drastic impact that intermittent nationalized shifts have on partisan support.