The role of candidate location in intra-party competition: A comparative investigation of preferential-list PR elections

Previous research on preferential voting and intra-party competition shows that local ties increase a candidate’s personal electoral success in preferential-list PR systems (Jankowski, 2016; Put and Maddens, 2015; Put et al. 2020; Tavits, 2010). Emphasizing local ties is therefore considered as an effective personal vote-seeking strategy as voters use these attributes localness as information shortcut to simplify their vote decision (Collignon and Sajuria, 2018; Shugart et al., 2005). The salience of candidate localism – from both the candidate and voter perspective - is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. Yet most existing studies focus on a single country case and do not take into account important contextual variables that potentially condition the effectiveness of this vote-seeking strategy. This paper presents a comparative investigation of the role of local ties in three recent country elections with different geographic contexts and electoral system attributes: Finland 2019 (open list PR, one preference vote), Belgium 2019 (flexible-list PR with multiple preferential votes) and Lithuania 2016 (the open list PR tier of its mixed system, multiple preferential votes). The conventional theory on incentives to cultivate personal votes (Carey and Shugart, 1995) predicts that the effect of local ties should be strongest in the case of Finland and weakest in the Belgian election. Based on an original data set of election candidates in these three recent preferential-list PR elections, the empirical analysis offers a fine-grained comparative analysis of the impact of a local ties (i.e. local-level political officeholder) on the intra-party vote shares of candidates. We test whether the importance of local ties varies over candidate location (i.e. living in a municipality centrally located in the electoral district or bordering other districts), local co-partisan crowdedness (i.e. number of candidates from the same or neighboring municipalities) and the rural-urban character of a candidate’s place of residence. As regards the electoral system attributes, we hypothesize that ballot structure, the allowed number of preferential votes and district magnitude condition the effectiveness of local PVEA on intra-party vote shares. Future results will offer important insights on the role of local ties in electoral careers cross-nationally.