Nationalization in Local Elections

Abstract

There is an important debate about how much the nationalization of American politics has affected local politics, but less theoretical development of the implications for representation. We provide new evidence on local voting behavior from the largest survey to date of U.S. voters in local elections and develop a new theory of incidental representation that results from nationalization. We show that voting for partisan local offices resembles voting in state and federal elections, with voters' choices strongly connected to their party identification and their views on national policies. In nonpartisan local elections, voters' choices are less strongly related to party identification but remain linked to national policy attitudes. In both types of local elections, voting is only weakly related to attitudes toward local policies. However, because local policy attitudes are correlated with party identification and national policy attitudes, even ``nationalized" voting still allows voters to choose local candidates who match their views on local policies. Our findings thus speak to the nature of representation in local governments.