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Why friends and neighbors? Explaining the electoral appeal of local roots

Campbell, Rosie; Cowley, Philip; Vivyan, Nick; Wagner, Markus

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Authors

Rosie Campbell

Philip Cowley

Markus Wagner



Abstract

Why do politicians with strong local roots receive more electoral support? The mechanisms underlying this well-documented “friends and neighbors” effect remain largely untested. Drawing on two population-based survey experiments fielded in Britain, we provide the first experimental test of a commonly posited cue-based explanation, which argues that voters use politicians’ local roots (descriptive localism) to make inferences about politicians’ likely actions in office (behavioral localism). Consistent with the cue-based account, we find that a politician’s local roots are less predictive of voter evaluations when voters have access to explicit information about aspects of the politician’s actual behavioral localism. However, we also find that voters’ positive reaction to local roots is only partially explained by a cue-based account in which voters care about the aspects of behavioral localism tested in this article. Our findings inform a normative debate concerning the implications of friends-and-neighbors voting for democratic representation and accountability.

Citation

Campbell, R., Cowley, P., Vivyan, N., & Wagner, M. (2019). Why friends and neighbors? Explaining the electoral appeal of local roots. Journal of Politics, 81(3), 937-951. https://doi.org/10.1086/703131

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Apr 26, 2018
Online Publication Date May 6, 2019
Publication Date Jul 31, 2019
Deposit Date Apr 27, 2018
Publicly Available Date May 6, 2020
Journal Journal of Politics
Print ISSN 0022-3816
Electronic ISSN 1468-2508
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 81
Issue 3
Pages 937-951
DOI https://doi.org/10.1086/703131
Related Public URLs http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/22099/

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Copyright Statement
© 2019 by the Southern Political Science Association.





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