We analyze whether voters value local political representation by
exploiting municipal mergers, which increase the number of candidates
available to voters and intensify political competition. In the Finnish
open-list proportional representation system, voters rank the candidates
within parties, and thus, concentrating votes to local candidates
increases the extent of local representation. Using a
difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the vote distributions
become more concentrated in municipalities less likely to gain local
representation after the mergers. Moreover, the effect is much larger in
municipalities where the benefits of local representation to voters are
large. The latter result disentangles voters' responses from the
responses of other political actors. The results are important also for
designing local government mergers, which are an important policy tool
in many countries. They highlight that concerns over deteriorating local
democracy due to mergers have merit, because voters have preferences
for local representation. At the same time, the vote concentration
patterns we find alleviate these concerns.