Why friends and neighbors? Explaining the electoral appeal of local roots
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1086/703131
Journal
Journal of Politics
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Show full item recordAbstract
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 where voters care only about are the aspects of behavioral localism tested in this
paper. Our findings inform a normative debate concerning the implications of friends-andneighbors voting for democratic representation and accountability