We find that, in agreement with our conjoint experiment’s result, voters expect local candidates to be focused on particularistic policies and elites to be focused on programmatic policies.

If voters are anti-elitist we would expect them to prefer local candidates in general. However, we instead find that their preference is context-dependent.

Voters show consistent and clear preferences for local cues over elite cues when deciding which candidate to vote for. As an example voters prefer candidates who attended their local national university over University of Tokyo graduates.

We show that Elites (in the Japanese context) such as bureaucrats or Dynastic candidates are less likely to have attended university in their district’s prefecture.