One needs parishes to be parochial : personal voting and localism in open list PR systems

Abstract

It investigates if the personal voting characteristic of open list PR systems does lead candidates to pursue the establishment of electoral geographical parishes. Are electoral parishes a frequent and a good electoral strategy? Literature on the personal voting usually presupposes that, under these systems, they are both. Frequently, arguments tend to see personal voting as not only a probabilistic propensity to entail the parochialization, but as an almost sufficient condition for it. However, we still know very little about the extent to which parishes are a consequence of the personal voting or of the districtalization of the systems. Here, it analyzes elections to the Lower Chamber in five countries, with results disaggregated at the local administrative level (municipalities) which lies within the countries' electoral circumscriptions (e.g. states, provinces, regions). The aim is to verify the distribution of candidates' electoral support across the territory, to assess how often candidates do have concentrated electoral support and whether it is electorally profitable. Results suggest that we should not follow common assumptionswithout caution, sincemany candidates do not have geographical electoral parishes. Concentrating votes is related to the overall geographic concentration of population. The electoral performance of parties is of upmost importance for candidates even under Open List. And spreading votes homogeneously across the territory is at least as profitable as concentrating.