The nationalization of presidential elections in the Americas

This article examines the nationalization of electoral change in presidential elections. It presents a technique to measure the national electoral swing and the subnational deviation in the electoral swing for each major presidential contender, for each consecutive pair of elections. The national swing indicates the uniform shift across electoral districts, whereas the subnational deviation indicates the extent of new district-level variation for any particular election. In addition, the nationalization score reveals the relative magnitude of the national and subnational components of district-level electoral change, which has the advantage of allowing comparisons across countries, parties, and elections. The article analyzes relative nationalization scores for all major candidates in 74 presidential elections from 14 countries in the Americas, and for electoral change that occurs between first and second round contests in majority run-off presidential elections.