„Głosowanie przyjacielsko-sąsiedzkie”: Przyczynek do badań w kontekście polskim

“Friends-and-neighbors voting”, that is, the tendency of voters to support local candidates (even in national elections) is a phenomenon known from a number of democracies. In this short article I focus on three constituencies to analyze it in the context of the Polish Senate election held in 2011. These analyses demonstrate a strong effect of “localness” of the candidates, despite the fact that the election was held in single-member districts, a system theoretically unfavorable to “friends- -and-neighbors voting”. At the same time, the above effect is much less pronounced in case of the candidates running on behalf of the two largest political parties. This suggests that some more general aspects of party competition at the national level may contribute to the suppression of the effect of the candidates’ personal traits, including their local roots, on their electoral success.