Preferential Voting in Finland: How Much Do Candidates Matter, and to Whom and Why?

Abstract

This paper examines preferential voting in six parliamentary elections in Finland, 1958-2007. The Finnish electoral system combines a proportional list system with mandatory candidate voting. The total number of list votes determines the number of seats a party list wins in an electoral district, while candidates are selected from the lists based on their personal votes. Six hypotheses are tested primarily with the aid of register data supplemented with individual-level data from national election studies. The overarching question is whether and why the distribution of candidate votes is uneven.The study shows that candidate votes have consistently deviated from a random distribution, but there is no clear trend over time. Strategic factors related to party size, district magnitude and the occurrence of list alliances among parties offer statistically significant explanations. Moreover, incumbent representatives have a clear advantage over other candidates. At the level of the individual voter, party identification makes a difference: citizens without a clear PID tend to stress candidates over parties. The ideological left-right dimension does not offer a robust explanation either on the aggregate or the individual level.