Local Representation and Strategic Voting: Evidence from Electoral Boundary Reforms

Abstract

We use Finnish local election voting data to analyze whether voters value local representation and act strategically to guarantee it. To identify such preferences and behavior, we exploit municipal mergers as natural experiments, which increase the number of candidates and parties available to voters and intensify political competition. Using difference-in-differences strategy, we find that voters in merged municipalities start to concentrate their votes to local candidates despite the larger choice set, whereas the vote distributions in the municipalities that did not merge remain the same. Moreover, the concentration effect is clearly larger in municipalities that are less likely to gain local representation in the post-merger councils. We also find that the effect increases both as the geographical distance and income heterogeneity between merging municipalities increases. We interpret these results as evidence of both preferences for local representation and strategic voting.JEL Codes: C21, C23, D72, H73, H77

Common pool problems in voluntary municipal mergers

“…Furthermore, Saarimaa and Tukiainen (2013) show that after a merger, councillors gain votes mostly from their old pre-merger constituencies. This means that some councillors are lame ducks effectively facing a term limit (e.g.…”

Political representation and effects of municipal mergers

“…However, since the party lists are open and voting for an individual candidate is mandatory, candidates may have personal electoral incentives to cater to their local voters, even though the voters can vote for any candidate in the post-merger municipality. Studying the same mergers as the current paper, Saarimaa and Tukiainen (2016) find that Finnish voters mostly keep on voting for the candidates from their home (pre-merger) municipality after a merger 3 . This means that electoral incentives may be quite similar to those in the US single member districts analyzed in much of the previous literature.…”

“…2010; Albouy 2013; Hodler and Raschky 2014; Fiva and Halse 2016), the issue has eluded the research on municipal mergers. This is an important and somewhat surprising gap in the literature given that mergers typically lead to more heterogeneous municipal populations and have large impacts on the representation of different geographic voter groups (Saarimaa and Tukiainen 2016). We are able to link these two literatures usually considered in isolation.…”

Citizens' Attitudes Towards Municipal Mergers – Individual‐level Explanations

“…Thus, municipal mergers involve various economic and fiscal effects (Blume & Blume 2007; Moisio & Uusitalo 2013; Hansen et al 2014; Allers & Geertsema 2016; Blesse & Baskaran 2016) as well as redistribution of resources between services or different groups of the population (e.g., Hovi et al 2009, 27; Jacobs 2016, 437; Yamada 2018; Harjunen et al 2019). Additionally, they often reshape political representation and power, especially when smaller municipalities merge with larger ones (Saarimaa & Tukiainen 2016; Yamada 2016; Harjunen et al 2019). Furthermore, to add to the complexity, some of the outcomes of a merger do not fully emerge until several decades after a decision to merge has been made (Rausch 2006; Moisio & Uusitalo 2013, 155; Allers & Geertsema 2016).…”