Tag Archives: sarah childs

What do the academics say? The voters want local candidates

By Mark Pack | Sat 30th April 2011 - 8:56 am

Welcome to the latest in our occasional series highlighting interesting findings from academic research. Today – the repeated finding that voters like local candidates:

Surveys have consistently found ‘localness’ to be one of the main criteria voters say they want in an election candidate. In each of five surveys between 1983 and 2005, voters ranked ‘to be from the local area’ or ‘to have been brought up in the area he or she represents’ (the precise question wording differed from survey to survey) as either the most important or the second most important characteristic that they were looking for in their

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