Reassessing Local Candidate Effects

Abstract

In a seminal article published in 2003, Blais et al. demonstrated that local candidates mattered for about 5 per cent of voters in the 2000 Canadian federal election. This study's reliance on a single election raises external validity concerns. We replicate Blais et al.'s original analyses on four elections from 2000 to 2008 using a decade's worth of data from the Canadian Election Study. The local candidate effect first uncovered by Blais et al. is not specific to a single election. Local candidates are a decisive consideration for about 5 to 8 per cent of voters outside Quebec and for about 2 to 5 per cent of voters in Quebec.

Government Preferences, Vote Choice and Strategic Voting in Canada

“…In total, this suggests that for about 1 per cent of voters outside Quebec and 4 per cent of voters inside Quebec, preference about government type is pivotal in causing them to abandon their preferred party (for a much larger fraction of Canadians, preference about government type is pivotal in causing them to remain with their preferred party). Between 2 per cent and 8 per cent of voters are motivated by local candidate characteristics that receive significant attention (Sevi et al, 2022), so these effect sizes are certainly worthy of attention.…”

“…If a significant number of voters focus on the local race instead of national factors, our findings might be biased. Recent research suggests this is unlikely; there is substantial agreement that local candidate evaluations are decisive for less than 10 per cent of voters (Blais et al, 2003; Blais and Daoust, 2017; Sevi et al 2022). We also control for the party that the respondent thought would win in their riding, to control for candidate viability (with Conservatives serving as the reference category).…”

Voting Behaviour in Canada: The State of the Discipline

“…The media spotlight may be on the party leaders, but the local candidate can be a decisive factor for 4 to 8 per cent of voters outside Quebec and 2 to 6 per cent of Quebec voters, depending on the election (Sevi et al, 2021; Stevens et al, 2019), and candidate evaluations may have caused as many as 10 per cent of seats to change hands in the 2015 election (Stevens et al, 2019). When they preferred a local candidate from a different party, two out of five voters opted for the candidate over their preferred party (Blais and Daoust, 2017).…”