Intraparty Competition, Geographic Responsiveness, and Incumbent Deselection in Closed-List Proportional Representation

Closed-list proportional representation is considered to produce politicians engaged in programmatic, party-oriented behavior. Personal vote-seeking and geographic responsiveness, however, are attributed to open-list or plurality systems. In this article, I argue that the focus on interparty competition masks incentives for geographic responsiveness generated by intraparty competition for nominations. Specifically, parties’ candidate selection methods that rely on locally minded delegates introduce incentives for incumbents to engage in localized responsiveness. Using survey experiments with party delegates in Germany and an original and novel dataset based on (historical) nomination protocols of the German Green party in combination with geo-referenced legislative behavior, I show that geographically responsive incumbents are preferred by delegates in survey experiments, rewarded with higher ranks and vote margins in the observational data, and that this is mainly limited to men who face greater competition. My findings shed new light on the interplay of electoral and selectoral incentives for behavior.