61 Rethinking local government: Essays on municipal reform - VATT

Do voters value <strong>local</strong> reprentation? Strategicvoting after municipal mergers5.5 Descriptive analysisWe start our analysis with a graphical example of the phenomenon weare after. Strategic voting due to preferences for <strong>local</strong> representationshould show up as concentration of votes to the candidates that havea chance of making it into the new council. As an example, we lookat the merger between a small municipality of Savonranta and thecity of Savonlinna. The populations of these municipalities are 1,238and 27,463, respectively. Figure 2 shows the vote distribution inSavonranta before (in 2004) and after the merger (in 2008) and Figure3 shows the respective distributions for Savonlinna. Candidates whoreceive zero votes are omitted from these histograms.The distributions of votes in both municipalities look roughly similarbefore the merger. Moreover, the distributions of votes in Savonlinnabefore and after are very similar. However, in Savonranta, the votedistribution changes dramatically after the merger. Before the merger,votes were spread out quite evenly, whereas after the merger twoclear “superstars” gather a lot of votes (note the change in the scaleof y and x-axis) and also the number of candidates receiving only onevote increases dramatically. Similar patterns, with clear evidence ofconcentrating votes to strong candidates in small merger partners, areobserved also in the other mergers. Importantly, the overall numberof votes in these two municipalities did not change dramaticallybetween the two elections.146