Original Article The within-district distribution of party candidates: A geographical analysis of party lists for Belgian lower house elections Gert-Jan Put a , Bart Maddens a and Frederik Verleden b a Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. b Centre for Political Research, KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Abstract Both political science and electoral geography scholars have demonstrated that locally rooted candidates matter in parliamentary elections. This article examines whether parties change the within-district distribution of party candidates to respond to local electoral volatility. If parties significantly lose votes in an area, they might consider compensating for this loss by increasing the number of local candidates in that area. Using data on the composition of candidate lists and election results for the Belgian Lower House (1987–2010) of eight political parties, we analyze the relationship between local vote shares and local candidate shares. In addition, we examine whether parties’ nomi- nation strategies are determined by the nature of their candidate selection processes. The OLS regression model shows that Belgian parties generally increase local candidate shares in response to local electoral setbacks. We found weak support for the argument that strategies on the within-district distribution of party candidates are related to intra- party candidate selection processes. Acta Politica advance online publication, 18 December 2015; doi:10.1057/ap.2015.26 Keywords: electoral geography; candidate selection; local candidates; local electoral volatility; Belgium Introduction How do parties respond to local electoral volatility in parliamentary elections? While election campaigns and results are becoming more and more nationalized (Caramani, 2004), political parties still need to deal with subnational variations in electoral support. A possible response to these variations is to change the within-district distribution of their candidates over subsequent elections. Parties that suffer electoral losses in certain local areas might be inclined to raise the number of locally rooted candidates from those areas on the candidate list for the next elections. The increased local presence of candidates could then lead to electoral recovery. © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 0001-6810 Acta Politica 1–20 www.palgrave-journals.com/ap/