Voting for Parties or for Candidates? The Trade-Off Between Party and Personal Representation in Spanish Regional and Local Elections

Abstract

When voters cast their ballot, are they choosing a
candidate or a party? Electoral systems have a
significant impact on how this question is answered
in each country. As previous literature has shown,
some electoral rules foster a more personal
representation, while others strengthen the
intermediary role of parties. In this paper I maintain
that there exists a trade-off between these two types
of representation. To empirically verify its existence
and how it works, I have chosen local and regional
elections in Spain as a case study. Given that they
take place simultaneously under similar electoral
systems, they can be considered a natural
experiment for the study of this trade-off, which
allows me to overcome the potential problems
of endogeneity present in previous studies. By

measuring the significance of ideological closeness
and candidate evaluations in voters’ decisions at
each level, it is shown that the importance of
personal representation increases in local elections
at the expense of a less frequent use of ideological
proximity as an informational shortcut, thus
confirming the existence of the trade-off.