Place-Based Identity and the Demand for Local Candidates

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.