📢 Why do citizens favor candidates from their own local communities? Our article on place-based identities and their effects on voting behavior for local candidates has just been published in Political Behavior. The article is co-authored with Paul C Bauer.

Following Key’s (1949) seminal account on ‘friends-and-neighbors’ voting in the US, researchers have demonstrated that voters across different countries, electoral contexts and political systems prefer candidates with local ties. Previous work has mostly focused on two broad sets of explanations accounting for the electoral advantage of candidates in their hometowns. These are, first, explanations related to the sociotropic correlates of a close geographical proximity between candidates and voters, like a greater contact frequency with candidates, or voters’ increased exposure to campaign activities. The second set of explanations has highlighted that voters prefer local candidates for strategic-instrumental motivations. According to these explanations, voters expect that a local candidate is better able to represent the interests of their local community or increase spending in favor of it.

In our article, we contend that voters’ preference for local candidates may also be an expression of their place-based social identity. Territorial identities and sentiments of local belonging can be powerful in shaping political behavior.

The opportunity to cast a ballot for a fellow citizen from their own local community makes voters’ place-based social identities salient. We argue that this increases the in-group bias that voters express in electoral decision-making to the extent that they even favor local candidates who are electorally not competitive. To test our argument, we draw on a rich and novel dataset that combines information on electoral returns at the municipal-level with information on the place of residence of all candidates that competed in the last two parliamentary elections in Germany (2013, 2017).

We identify the effect of candidates’ localness on their electoral success by exploiting within-electoral-district variation in their electoral returns and assess the role of place-based social identities both by means of a novel geo-matching strategy and by means of exploiting a specific feature of the German mixed-member electoral system.

This geo-matching strategy allows us to hold constant the sociotropic correlates of a close candidate-voter proximity at their maximal potential impact. It contrasts a candidate’s electoral performance to her performance in neighboring municipalities that are not only geographically extremely close to her home municipality (the average distance is less than 8km), but that are also most similar in terms of other characteristics that may promote a greater contact frequency between her and voters. The results show that candidates fare consistently and significantly better in their home municipalities than in the rest of their electoral districts, resulting in an electoral advantage of around two and a half percentage points.

We further isolate the effect of place-based social identities by assessing whether it also operates independently from the strategic-instrumental expectations that voters may have when electing a local candidate as documented by previous scholarship. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that German parties field candidates in all of the SMDs to boost their visibility and their resulting electoral performance in the proportional representation (PR) tier, which is ultimately decisive for the translation of votes to seats. By restricting our analysis to non-competitive SMD candidates, we demonstrate that voters’ electoral decision-making is biased towards candidates from their own local communities even when these candidates are without any prospects to gain office.

In uncritically favoring candidates from their own local communities, it appears, voters express their place-based social identity.

In highlighting the effect of place-based social identities on voting, our study contributes to a nascent body of literature on the social geography of contemporary democracies, reflecting a renewed interest in the social ramifications of political space. The origins of the well-documented “friends-and-neighbor” effect appear to lie also in a form of expressive voting, where voters aim to affirm local identities, rather than following strategic motivations or reacting to sociotropic factors.

👉 Check out the full paper, which is available open access at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09712-y.