Place-Based Identity and the Demand for Local Candidates
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Voters are known to reward candidates with local roots. Research offerstwo explanations: an instrumental account, in which local ties signal that acandidate will understand, prioritize, and deliver for the area, and an expres-sive account, in which voters respond to markers of localness themselves. In-creasingly, this expressive preference is understood as an expression of voters’place-based identity: the local cue signals that a candidate shares the voter’ssocial group. Whether identity drives the local vote has rarely been tested di-rectly. I combine a nationally representative British survey with a preregisteredUS experiment (n = 4,803) that pairs a vignette prime of place-based identitywith a candidate-choice conjoint. Identity is associated with greater impor-tance placed on candidates’ local traits, and the prime—though containing nocandidate information—increases the weight placed on local attributes, with noeffect on non-local attributes.
Source: SocArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Author: Albert Ward
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225654847
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