This means that, compared to simply being born in a location, consistent, pro-active engagement with the locality is more favored by voters.

Thank you for reading! I am looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts and impressions about our paper!

Our conjoint experiment also disaggregates what types of local ties contribute more to voter support. Local employment appears to yield the largest gains, followed by attending University in the prefecture, attending a local high school and one’s father being from locality.

They, however, prefer to elect candidates with local ties expecting them to be more effective at redistributing resources to their locality.

We therefore find that while local ties give better electoral returns compared to elite qualifications, voters are not anti-elitist on principle. They believe that elites are better at improving national welfare and enacting programmatic policies.

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.

3 of the policy areas are related to particularistic policy-making: the attraction of businesses to the locality, the promotion of tourism and public works. 3 are related to programmatic policy-making: Foreign Affairs, the service of the national debt and the National Pension.

In a follow up factorial experiment, we present voters with an elite profile and a local profile of candidates from different Japanese political parties and ask them which candidate they expect to focus more on a given policy area. We select 6 policies areas.

While local candidates are expected to contribute more to local welfare, elite university graduates or central government bureaucrats are expected to be better for the country.

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.

We then delve into why voters exhibit preferences for local candidates over elites. We ask voters which type of candidate will contribute more to their local welfare, and which type of candidate will contribute more to national welfare.

They also prefer candidates who work in the prefectural assembly, local lawyers or employees at a local small or medium size business over bureaucrats (a stereotypical elite career in Japan). Both types of candidates are generally preferred to non-local non-elite candidates.

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.

their father’s job type and location, whether they attended a local high school and whether they attended the prefecture’s national University, another prefecture’s national university or an elite university (UTokyo or KyotoU) .

We then use a conjoint experiment to test voter’s preferences for different election candidate archetypes, varying signals of local connections and elite connections through attributes for their job’s type and location,

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.

Because prestigious institutions and careers tend to be located in urban centers, it is difficult to cultivate strong connections with one’s local area and an elite career. In table 1, we compare several types of politicians,