Friends and Neighbours Voting in Local Elections in Open List System: Evidence from Poland

Abstract

This paper seeks to extend previous analyses of localism of candidates� To our knowledge, this is the first study of the ‘friends and neighbours’ voting (FNV) effect in Central and Eastern Europe employing the data of the candidate’s exact place of residence and using dispersion of votes between electoral precincts, as in Poland votes in each precinct are counted and published separately� The basic hypothesis of the paper was that the place of residence is a factor that significantly affects the spatial distribution of votes� Using spatial autocorrelation, we identify spatial clusters of votes for specific candidates� The conducted research indicates that the intensity of the FNV effect differs between candidates� This local bonus, which in fact is the FNV effect, is an attribute of selected candidates� It can be seen that a candidate’s locality is a more important attribute influencing voting results in certain city districts, — ABSTRAKT —