Abstract
How does a political party choose where to field candidates or party lists? Traditional models of party competition mainly focus on strategy: parties enter districts where they believe they could win many votes or seats. These strategic considerations are typically couched in terms of ideological positioning and the mechanics of the vote-to-seat translation at the district level. However, parties' entry decisions are also subject to geographical limitations and no prior study has explored the extent to which geography limits strategic entry at the district level. In this paper, we explore the severity of those limitations by modeling strategic and geographic factors side-by-side. In so doing, we find that geography limits parties' entry decisions, specifically by dampening the effects of strategic incentives to enter in geographically distant districts. We utilize a highly detailed district-level database of seven multimember European countries and tens of thousands of party entry decisions across these districts.
•Prior work on electoral competition has not studied strategic and spatial dynamics side-by-side.•We review literature on party strategy and electoral geography and explain their interaction.•We build a model of selective party entry across districts that draws on both sets of considerations.•We find that spatial proximity between districts impacts parties' strategic entry decisions.•We note the import of this and call for greater integration of geographic space in models of electoral competition.
