Local roots and the acquisition of personal votes: the case of single-member district candidates in the 2018 Italian general election

This article investigates the relationship between candidates’ local roots and the share of personal votes received. The literature on personal votes emphasizes that candidates with strong connections to their constituencies tend to receive more personal votes than candidates with limited or no territorial connections. However, most research focuses almost exclusively on elected candidates, and localness is frequently operationalized as a dichotomous variable rather than as an ordinal one. This is a drawback on contemporary research on voting behaviour because it fails to reveal how different localness profiles affect the acquisition of personal votes. Using an original data set on single-member district candidates from the Italian 2018 general election, this article addresses the relationship between a localness index–derived from the literature–and the share of personal votes. The analysis shows that candidates with higher localness or which held monocratic political positions at the local level (notably mayors) tend to receive more personal votes. However, the interaction analysis shows that there is no effect of monocratic positions in multiplying the shares of personal votes obtained by local candidates.