( Reference Blumenau2017) points to an important, and so far overlooked, research problem. Results suggest that the British Conservative Party would, indeed, gain votes at the expense of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) under open rather than closed lists when information on candidate positions is given. Footnote 1 Their empirical evidence comes from a survey experiment in the UK, presenting respondents with a fictitious European Parliament election with four experimental groups that differ in the list type (open versus closed list) and information provision (yes versus no) on candidate positions regarding Brexit. ( Reference Blumenau2017) recently introduced an alternative perspective: when an issue cuts across existing party lines and becomes salient to the public, open-list (as compared with closed-list) proportional representation (PR) may electorally favour parties that offer candidates with varying positions on the issue over parties that do not. Reasons include preference homogeneity due to the sorting of politicians and voters into parties (Krehbiel Reference Krehbiel1993), party leaders' ex ante screening of candidates or ex post monitoring of representatives (see, for example, Bowler, Farrell and Katz Reference Bowler, Farrell, Katz, Bowler, Farrell and Katz1999 Carroll and Nalepa Reference Carroll and Nalepa2020), and voters' insufficient information about individual candidates.Д«lumenau et al. Policy-related deviations from the party line, on the other hand, are not regarded as a widespread form of appealing to voters (at least not in parliamentary systems of government). A core argument suggests that intra-party competition induced by open ballot structures boosts non-policy types of representation (see, for example, AndrГ©, Depauw and Shugart Reference AndrГ©, Depauw, Shugart, Martin, Saalfeld and StrГёm2014 Crisp et al. A large literature revolves around the contrast between voting for parties and voting for individual candidates, examining its consequences for voters, elites and the nature of representation (see, for example, Carey and Shugart Reference Carey and Shugart1995 Colomer Reference Colomer2011).

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