Friends and neighbours politics in Belgian candidate selection processes. Does place matter?

Place would matter in politics. This would hold particularly true for the relationship between voters and politicians. According to the friends and neighbours voting hypothesis (Key 1949), psychological connections between voters and candidates involve that voters would favour local candidates because ‘hometown candidates’ may better know what they want, but more pragmatically, since they may also directly help the voters by engaging in pork-barrel politics. This paper focuses on geographical representation on electoral lists and takes the political parties’ perspective. Parties are expected to value the geographical origin of candidates primarily because voters do so. But when drafting the lists, would all types of selectorates assess the importance of localness similarly? This research tests whether the selection mode impacts the extent of territorial coverage of the constituency by all candidates from a same list. It takes Belgium as a case in point for studies on territorial representation given its multimember constituency and preferential voting systems. The processes of candidate selection in eleven Belgian political parties are investigated in the run-up to the May 2014 ‘mother of all elections’ where European, federal and regional elections were organised on the same day. 4319 individual candidates and 189 selection processes are quantitatively examined. Preliminary results indicate that centralised selectorates prioritise friends and neighbours politics less than decentralised selectorates do.