Beyond political ideology: the role of geography and status in local elections

Abstract

We study the role of two types of non-ideological proximity between candidates and voters in electoral outcomes. In particular, our framework focuses on spatial and social status proximity between agents, based on the assumption that individuals interact more with people who are spatially close and that are drawn to others perceived as similar. We explore two decisions that are fundamental in any electoral process. The first decision is whether to run for office or not, while the second is who to vote for given a set of candidates.

We use data on the municipal elections held in 2021 in Chile amidst a complex political context, where both partisanship and trust in politicians has steadily declined. We argue than in this political scenario, the individual characteristics of candidates become more relevant. When studying the role of spatial and status proximity between voters and candidates, local elections are well suited because they involve the smallest voter-to-representative ratio and candidates are usually voters' neighbors.

Our analysis on spatial proximity between agents draws on the geocoded electoral roll of Santiago, while status proximity is studied using a novel approach based on people's surnames. Our results show that the population density of the area where candidates reside, a variable that we used to measure spatial proximity, does not correlate with their decision to become candidate nor with their probability of winning the election. When studying status proximity, we found that uncommon surnames associated with the Chilean upper class are overrepresented in almost all the municipalities in the sample, suggesting that independent of socioeconomic status voters prefer candidates with these uncommon (and high-status) surnames.