The ‘Home Grown’ Presidency: empirical evidence on localism in presidential voting, 1972–2000

Abstract

This builds upon the conceptual framework of Lewis-Beck and Rice (American Journal of Political Science, 27, 548–56, 1983), in combination with the empirical design of Kjar and Laband (Public Choice, 112, 143–50, 2002), to investigate home grown-ness in US presidential elections from 1972–2000. It found that, ceteris paribus, home state vote shares for US Presidential election winners are 5.19–15.11 percentage points higher due to the home grown-ness effect. In the eight presidential elections analysed, this study confirms two aspects of prior work. First, the estimate of a home grown-ness effect in presidential elections of 5.19 percentage points (on average), supports the 4 percentage point average found by Lewis-Beck and Rice (1983). Second, that support for the winning president monotonically increases as moves are made away from the opponent's home territory confirms the cascading dummy variable series approach developed by Kjar and Laband (2002).