Keeping Up With the Joneses? Neighbourhood Effects on the Vote

Abstract

Voters are affected by cues from their immediate social environment. One of these cues consists of the political opinions available and accepted in people’s neighbourhoods, which are theoretically expected to affect vote choices through direct or indirect forms of communication. We test this assertion by employing a longitudinal design combining fine-grained geo-coded panel data with election results on a uniquely local level in the Netherlands. We assess the effect of the level of support for parties in a neighbourhood (consisting of just 624 households on average) on the vote choices of individuals 5 years later, while controlling for their previous vote choice. We find that the political preferences of neighbours indeed affect respondents’ subsequent vote choice, but only for those voters who feel strongly embedded in the local community. We conclude that, even in the highly fragmented Dutch context, the political choices of citizens can be influenced by neighbourhood effects.