Local representation and strategic voting: Evidence from electoral boundary reforms

Tuukka Saarimaa and Janne Tukiainen

European Journal of Political Economy, 2016, vol. 41, issue C, 31-45

Abstract: We analyze whether voters value local political representation by exploiting municipal mergers, which increase the number of candidates available to voters and intensify political competition. In the Finnish open-list proportional representation system, voters rank the candidates within parties, and thus, concentrating votes to local candidates increases the extent of local representation. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the vote distributions become more concentrated in municipalities less likely to gain local representation after the mergers. Moreover, the effect is much larger in municipalities where the benefits of local representation to voters are large. The latter result disentangles voters' responses from the responses of other political actors. The results are important also for designing local government mergers, which are an important policy tool in many countries. They highlight that concerns over deteriorating local democracy due to mergers have merit, because voters have preferences for local representation. At the same time, the vote concentration patterns we find alleviate these concerns.

Keywords: Electoral boundary reform; Difference-in-differences; 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)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Local Representation and Strategic Voting: Evidence from Electoral Boundary Reforms (2015)
Working Paper: Local representation and strategic voting: evidence from electoral boundary reforms (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:41:y:2016:i:c:p:31-45

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2015.10.008

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