Replication Data for: What's in a name? Name recognition, place-based identities, and candidate success

Harvard Dataverse

Abstract

Voters often prefer candidates from their region, a stylized fact of electoral politics known as friends-and-neighbors voting. However, traditional explanations of this pattern - candidate familiarity and expectations of behavioral localism - cannot account for how voters discern candidate localness in the absence of explicit cues. This article introduces local name recognition as a novel, accessible heuristic rooted in place-based identities. Using data on relative surname dispersion and outcomes of constituency races in German national elections (2005--2021) as well as a survey experiment, we show that regionally typical surnames enhance candidates' success, whereas out-of-region names disadvantage them. These effects are strongest among rural and locally rooted voters. These findings highlight how place-based identities drive both positive and negative voter biases - a mechanism with broad applicability given the prevalence of place-based identities and regionalized distributions of surnames in many countries.

Authors 2

1. Arndt Leininger

   Universität Hamburg

   Affiliation as printed

   Universität Hamburg

2. Tilko Swalve Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University