61 Rethinking local government: Essays on municipal reform - VATT

Tuukka Saarimaa – Janne Tukiainenunits are parties in the 2004 municipalities. 25 From the number ofobservations, we see that none of the parties had candidates in all themunicipalities and that the three largest parties are represented moreoften than the other parties. In table 4, we report results concerningwhether parties lose votes to other parties due to mergers. We find noevidence of this. In general, the merger has no effects on the numberof votes that parties receive. This means that voters are not willingto tradeoff their party preferences for <strong>local</strong> representation. This alsoimplies that any vote concentration by voters should be within parties.According to the results reported in Tables 5 and 6, this is indeed thecase. For the larger parties, and especially for the Centre Party, theparty level effects largely mimic what we find at the (old) municipalitylevel. However, we find no evidence of increased concentrationamong the smaller parties. Finding the strongest effects for the CentreParty is as expected, because the Centre Party has a strong supportin almost all rural municipalities, but limited support in most urbanareas. Therefore, the Centre Party has most to lose from mergers interms of political power, and thus, its voters have most to gain fromstrategic voting.25 We also estimated the model specifications in Eq. (1) and (2). The results weresimilar to those reported Tables 4 through 6.153