I wrote a short contribution on the LSE EUROPP blog, analysing the German parties’ candidates ahead of the Federal Election 2017.

The idea originally came about as I was looking for an interesting application of the powerful genderizeR package, but after obtaining the data, we discovered that there is quite some interesting variation across parties regarding the place of birth of candidates. We geocoded the (self-reported) place of birth of candidates and found that the anti-immigrant AfD has the second-highest share of foreign born candidates.

This LSE EUROPP blog post inspired co-author Paul Bauer and me to start a research project in which we analyze the effects that shared local ties with candidates have for their electoral success, taking on the classical “friends-and-neighbour” voting argument by Key (1949).