Home Field Advantage

Talk Local to Me: Assessing the Heterogenous Effects of Localistic Appeals

“…The second reason why going local may be effective is that voters may use local cues to infer representational behavior. Previous research focusing on non-American contexts has found that voters use local cues ("descriptive localism"), such as those regarding candidate roots, as a proxy for a candidate's likely "representational localism" (Campbell et al, 1960;Hunt, 2022). Other public opinion research conducted in the United States shows that a majority of Americans believe that candidates born in the districts that they are running in are better able to understand their constituents' wants and needsa belief that those high in place identity were especially likely to hold (Munis, 2021).…”

“…15 We transformed the measure so each state's value relates to the party of the individual senators of that state, with positive values indicating that the state is more amenable toward that member's party than the country as a whole, while negative values indicate that the state is more hostile toward that member's party than the country as a whole. 16 We also include a binary variable indicating whether the Senator was born in the district (Hunt, 2022), a binary variable for partisanship, and a binary variable indicating whether the Senator is a moderate. 17 Next, we estimated an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model, with time (Congress) fixed effects, regressing the proportion of each Congress member's Facebook posts that are locally focused (or dependent measure) on their state's partisan lean, as well as our three control variables.…”

Polarization and Place‐Based Representation in US State Legislatures

“…Localized place attachment, on the other hand, is in many ways an identity that all voters in a district could possess. And as a candidate, emphasizing place‐based appeals is less likely to lead to divisiveness or the estrangement of certain voter subsets, since the geographic district is the one factor all constituents have in common (Hunt 2022a; Munis and Burke 2023). Indeed, classic works like Fenno's Home Style cover at length in the qualitative space how crucial these appeals are for certain members’ representation and electoral prospects.…”

“…Scholars like Mayhew, for example, have made the case that for a legislator, “a power base that is substantially independent of party” (1974, 26) changes their manner of representation and improves their electoral viability. If the key sources of a legislator's political and financial support (Hunt 2022a) come from within their district (via their local roots), they likely are less dependent on legislative party leaders for financial, electoral, or policy support, and as a result feel more flexibility to work across the aisle (Kaslovsky and Crosson 2023). More specifically, when legislators’ political capital is reaped and sown locally, it allows much more independence from extreme party line votes or nationalized interests.…”

“…If the two boundaries cross each other, we coded them as being born in their home district, since the exact geographic location of their birth is impossible to determine for the vast majority of legislators, city boundaries are the most granular intersection available. See Hunt (2022a) and Hunt and Rouse (2023) for more details on this coding scheme.…”