Local representation and strategic voting: evidence from electoral boundary reforms

Tuukka Saarimaa and Janne Tukiainen

No 2013/32, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: We use Finnish local election voting data to analyze whether voters value local representation and act strategically to guarantee it. To identify such preferences and behavior, we exploit municipal mergers as natural experiments, which increase the number of candidates and parties available to voters and intensify political competition. Using difference-in-differences strategy, we find that voters in merged municipalities start to concentrate their votes to local candidates despite the larger choice set, whereas the vote distributions in the municipalities that did not merge remain the same. Moreover, the concentration effect is clearly larger in municipalities that are less likely to gain local representation in the post-merger councils. We also find that the effect increases both as the geographical distance and income heterogeneity between merging municipalities increases. We interpret these results as evidence of both preferences for local representation and strategic voting.

Keywords: Electoral boundary reform; local representation; municipality mergers; strategic voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C23 D72 H73 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Local representation and strategic voting: Evidence from electoral boundary reforms (2016)
Working Paper: Local Representation and Strategic Voting: Evidence from Electoral Boundary Reforms (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2013-32

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