Second-order elections

Second-order elections are elections that have less importance for voters than first-order elections, and thus are often used by voters to punish or reward the current governing parties. Local and regional elections are almost always considered second-order elections. In the EU elections to the European Parliament are considered to be second-order national elections, in that voters use their choices for representatives to the supranational body to send signals to their national governments.

The term has appeared for the first time in Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt's "Nine second-order national elections -A conceptual framework for the analysis of European election results" article for the European Journal of Political Research, in 1980.