Replication Data for: Local candidates, place-based identities, and electoral success (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09712-y)
This repository contains the replication material for the article Schulte-Cloos and Bauer (2021): Local candidates, place-based identities, and electoral success. In: Political Behavior, DOI: 10.1007/s11109-021-09712-y.
⭐ The R Markdown file Schulte-Cloos-and-Bauer-2021_Local-candidates_REPLICATION.Rmd contains all code to reproduce the results.
⭐ The HTML file Schulte-Cloos-and-Bauer-2021_Local-candidates_REPLICATION.html is the rendered output of the R Markdown file. It contains all figures and tables reported in the main article and in the supplemental material accompanying the published manuscript. 💡 You can also inspect the code by activating the option Show All Code on the top right of the HTML file.
⭐ You can also access the replication material and reproduce the results from within your browser with no need to install on your local machine the software package R, the RStudio IDE, or any of the R libraries that the analysis relies on.
- 💡 The runtime environment created for the Binder uses an MRAN snapshot of 2021-05-18 and relies on R version 4.0.5.
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While a large body of literature empirically documents an electoral advantage for local candidates, the exact mechanisms accounting for this effect remain less clear. We integrate theories on the political geography of candidate-voter relations with socio-psychological accounts of citizens’ local attachment, arguing that citizens vote for candidates from their own local communities as an expression of their place-based identity. To test our argument, we exploit a unique feature of the German mixed-member electoral system. We identify the causal effect of candidates’ localness by relying on within-electoral-district variation coupled with a geo-matching strategy on the level of municipalities (N=11175). The results show that voters exhibit a strong bias in favor of local candidates even when they are not competitive. More than only expecting particularistic benefits from representatives, citizens appear to vote for candidates from their own local community to express their place-based social identity.
Schulte-Cloos, Julia; Bauer, Paul C., 2021, "Replication Data for: Local candidates, place-based identities, and electoral success", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5ORK7C, Harvard Dataverse, V1.