In this paper we explore how the uniformity of electoral swings in the district vote within countries is affected by the level of economic and political decentralization. We focus on the electoral consequences of the Great Recession and run two different analyses. First, we rely on district-level data in consecutive elections before and after the Great Recession to show whether the change in a party’s electoral support in all districts of the country is more heterogeneous the more decentralized the country is. Second, we rely on individual panel data to examine the causal mechanisms accounting for the effect of decentralization