Clowns, ‘Alluring Ducks’ and ‘Miss Finland 2009’: The Value of ‘Celebrity Candidates’ in an Open-List Pr Voting System

Carey and Shugart (1995 Carey, John M. and Matthew Shugart. 1995. Incentives to cultivate a personal vote: a rank ordering of electoral formulas. Electoral Studies 14 (4): 417–39. doi: 10.1016/0261-3794(94)00035-2[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: 419) have noted that ‘the national celebrity enjoyed by movie stars or athletes can translate into valuable personal reputation in some electoral systems’. Indeed, in open-list voting systems, such as Brazil, Estonia and Finland, this type of ‘celebrity candidate’ has become commonplace. Focusing on Finland over the period of six general elections between 1991 and 2011, this article asks: what has been the overall value—strategic and electoral—of the celebrity candidate when viewed from a party management perspective? Why in a consolidated party-based representative democracy like Finland—unlike contemporary Brazil or Estonia in the 1990s—have parties appeared ready to reduce the ‘partyness’ of the electoral process by recruiting candidates many of whom have had little or no party ‘past’, and what implications has this development had for representative democracy?