Who Wins More? Understanding Preferential Voting by Means of Context and Candidates’ Background and Campaigning

This chapter analyses the triggers of preferential voting in Belgium. Combining both contextual and candidate level information, the authors first test how features of the electoral and political competition (i.e. position on the list, district and party magnitude) influence preferential votes. Then, they focus on the role of individual characteristics of candidates, taking into account not only their socio-demographic background, but also their attitudinal and behavioural attributes. In particular, candidates’ ties with their own local constituencies, previous political experience, as well as the resources and tools they employed during the campaign are widely explored in the chapter.