District magnitude structures the options open to voters and shapes the incentives legislators have to cultivate a personal reputation. But district magnitude can be a proxy of different ‘mechanisms’ tying to the electoral rules the one trait that is capable of attracting a personal vote across a wide range of electoral systems: that is, a legislator’s local roots. For the first time, recent alternative measures regarding the underlying causal variable are tested using new data in the six countries. On the one hand, district magnitude is found to have the predicted differential effect on legislators’ local office-holding in open-list and closed-list systems. Even as the number of legislators having held local office decreases as their electoral constituency grows in size, on the other hand it is intra-party competition that is the key.