61 Rethinking local government: Essays on municipal reform - VATT

Tuukka Saarimaa – Janne TukiainenThe Finnish municipal elections use the open-list method. Thisaspect is crucial for our analysis because voters vote not only forthe party, but for the individual candidates. Thus, they can influencethe position of their <strong>local</strong> candidate on the party list even afterthe merger. However, parties act as gatekeepers and choosethe candidates. This may confound our analysis, because if only few<strong>local</strong> candidates from smaller municipalities make it to the postmergerlists, the observed change in concentration after the merger insmall municipalities may not be due to strategic voting, but simplydue to changes in the set of candidates. We can address this issue to acertain extent in the subsequent analysis.5.4 Data and empirical strategyDataOur main data source is the election database maintained bythe Ministry of Justice. 19 We have data on votes received byindividual candidates from two municipal elections held in Octoberof 2004 and 2008. The 2008 municipal elections were held usingthe new merged municipalities as constituencies. 20 The novel feature ofour data is that they include information on polling districts within amunicipality. That is, we observe the number of votes coming fromdifferent polling districts for each candidate. The number of pollingdistricts varies between municipalities, but the important thingfor our purposes is that polling districts are used only for vote countingand voting location purposes and there are no quotas in municipalcouncils based on the polling district division.Since municipalities are divided into (time invariant) pollingdistricts we can build a panel data set where the cross-sectionalunits are the municipalities in 2004, i.e. before the mergers. 21 That19 Similar data are also freely available online at Statistics Finland’s website.20 In some cases, the municipalities merged officially at the start of 2009. However,also in these cases the new municipality division was used in the 2008 elections.21 In some cases, the polling districts changed and we were unable to trace back theold municipal division. In these cases, we drop the entire merger from the analysis.141