Where candidates live matters to voters, and they show it in their voting

Where candidates live matters to voters, and they show it in their voting 3

A bit dated now, but still relevant: Showcasing our research at the Democratic Audit: That voters prefer to elect local candidates is a long-held assumption of British politics. Professor Jocelyn Evans’ research has sought to test that assumption. He found that the geographical distance between candidates’ homes and the constituency had a measurable impact on…

Why Merkel’s Refusal to Help the Ailing FDP Will Come back to Haunt Her

The centre-right coalition could have continued with a little help for the FDP. Without doubt, this result is a great triumph for Merkel. But I think the CDU leadership may have outwitted themselves, and the stern, slightly grumpy expression Merkel wore as she left the celebrations seems to confirm it.

Local Heroes? Der Effekt räumlicher Distanz zwischen Wählern und Kandidaten bei der Unterhauswahl in England 2010″ (Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences)

Slides (in German) for my recent talk about our geolocation and voting project at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences. The presentation is based on [bibtex file=ka.bib key=arzheimer-evans-2012]. The full PDF for the presentation is here.

New Publication: The Left, East vs West, and the 2009 Election

VS/Springer has just published the a massive volume on the 2009 Bundestag election. Our chapter looks (once more) into the differences between voters in the former Federal Republic and their eastern compatriots in the 2009 election. While these differences persist, we find that people in the West are also deviating from traditional patterns of voting behaviour. (In German)

Call for Papers: Perspectives on the New Right (ECPR General Conference 2013)

Liz Carter and I are organising a rather large section on the New Right (aka Radical Right, Populist Right, Extreme Right) for the 7th ECPR General Conference that will run from September 4 to September 7 this year. With six quality panels, we can accommodate up to 30 papers, which is obviously great. More specifically,…

English Voters Prefer Local Candidates, Ceteris Paribus

The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants’ support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual’s support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters’ choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.