Personalized Candidate Campaigns in Open-Ballot PR Elections

Open ballot PR election lead to a great amount of intra-party competition. In order to get elected, candidates have to make more votes than candidates from the same party and of course be on a party list that makes at least one seat; how candidates from other parties do is irrelevant. After explaining the Swiss electoral system, we explore in a first step the personal vote seeking attempts of individual candidates in the 2007 national election in Switzerland using data from the comparative candidate survey CCS. We find that most candidates are aware that they have very little chances of getting elected and as a consequence claim that they want to help the party rather than advancing their own career. We also look at in what we think is one of its most important analytical features – open-list PR with hugely varying district sizes in the lower chamber elections – to empirically investigate some of Carey and Shugart's (1995) original claims about candidates' incentives to cultivate a ‘personal vote'. We can show that contrary to Carey and Shugarts expectations, we don't have a clear positive effect between district magnitude and personal vote seeking attempts