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Incumbency Advantage (incumbency + advantage)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences87%

Selected Abstracts

Using Multimember District Elections to Estimate the Sources of the Incumbency Advantage

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009
Shigeo Hirano
In this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. Multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats within the same district. This allows us to identify both the direct office-holder benefits and the incumbent quality advantage over nonincumbent candidates from the same party. We find that the overall incumbency advantage is of similar magnitude as that found in previous studies. We attribute approximately half of this advantage to incumbents' quality advantage over open-seat candidates and the remainder to direct office-holder benefits. However, we also find some evidence that direct office-holder benefits are larger in competitive districts than in safe districts and in states with relatively large legislative budgets per capita. [source]

ESTIMATING INCUMBENCY EFFECTS IN U.S. STATE LEGISLATURES: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2010
YOGESH UPPAL
This paper estimates the incumbency effects in elections to the House of Representatives of 45 states in the United States using a quasi-experimental research method, regression discontinuity design (RDD). This design isolates the causal effect of incumbency from other contemporaneous factors, such as candidate quality, by comparing incumbents and non-incumbents in close contests. I find that incumbents in state legislative elections have a significant advantage, and this advantage serves as a strong barrier to re-entry of challengers who had previously been defeated. However, the incumbency advantage estimated using the RDD is much smaller than are the estimates using existing methods, implying a significant selection bias in the latter. [source]

Polls and Elections: Opinion Formation, Polarization, and Presidential Reelection

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2009
BARRY C. BURDEN
The authors examine the dynamics of public opinion formation and change around a sitting president and their implications for reelection contests. Because of the biases inherent in information processing and the information environment, two distinct, but simultaneous, effects of citizen learning during a presidential term are expected. For those with prior opinions of the president, learning contributes to more polarized evaluations of the president. For those initially uncertain about the president, learning contributes to opinion formation about the president. Because the gap in uncertainty generally favors the incumbent over a lesser-known challenger, races with an incumbent presidential candidate are typically marked, perhaps paradoxically, by both a polarization of public opinion and an incumbency advantage. [source]

Fiscal Policy and Presidential Elections: Update and Extension

PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2000
ALFRED G. CUZÁN
This article updates, deepens, and extends previous articles published in this journal on the relation between fiscal policy and presidential elections. It presents evidence that is consistent with the view that voters reward fiscal frugality and punish fiscal expansion. The relationship is robust with respect to economic conditions, presidential incumbency, number of consecutive terms in the White House by presidents of the same party, and war. An intriguing finding is that, when fiscal policy is controlled for, incumbency advantage practically disappears. It is hoped that these findings will stimulate more political scientists, especially students of the presidency, to pay more attention to the role of fiscal policy in presidential elections. [source]

Using Multimember District Elections to Estimate the Sources of the Incumbency Advantage

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009
Shigeo Hirano
In this article we use a novel research design that exploits unique features of multimember districts to estimate and decompose the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Like some existing related studies we also use repeated observations on the same candidates to account for unobserved factors that remain constant across observations. Multimember districts have the additional feature of copartisans competing for multiple seats within the same district. This allows us to identify both the direct office-holder benefits and the incumbent quality advantage over nonincumbent candidates from the same party. We find that the overall incumbency advantage is of similar magnitude as that found in previous studies. We attribute approximately half of this advantage to incumbents' quality advantage over open-seat candidates and the remainder to direct office-holder benefits. However, we also find some evidence that direct office-holder benefits are larger in competitive districts than in safe districts and in states with relatively large legislative budgets per capita. [source]

Manipulating Electoral Rules to Manufacture Single-Party Dominance

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2008
Kenneth Mori McElwain
This article argues that the LDP manufactured its parliamentary dominance in postwar Japan by strategically altering specific facets of the electoral system. More generally, I demonstrate that intraparty politics play a crucial role in determining when and how electoral rules are changed. Despite widespread evidence that the LDP would win more seats under an SMP electoral formula, party leaders were repeatedly blocked from replacing the postwar MMD-SNTV system by intraparty incumbents, who feared that such a change would harm their individual reelection prospects. However, party leaders had greater leeway in altering rules that generated fewer intraparty conflicts. Between 1960 and 1990, the LDP implemented approximately fifty changes to campaign regulations, most of which were aimed at enhancing the incumbency advantage of all rank-and-file MPs. Statistical tests confirm that absent pro-incumbent revisions to the electoral code, the LDP would have succumbed to declining public popularity and lost its majority at least a decade earlier. [source]

The Variable Incumbency Advantage: New Voters, Redistricting, and the Personal Vote

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2003
Scott W. Desposato
In this article we explore the personal vote costs of redistricting. After redistricting, incumbents often face significant numbers of new voters,voters that were previously in a different incumbent's district. Existing conceptualizations of the incumbency advantage suggest that the cost to incumbents of having new voters should be relatively small and predictable. We propose a different formulation: a variable incumbency advantage. We argue that any incumbency advantage among the electorate is a function of short-term effects, partisanship, and electoral saliency. We use a massive untapped dataset of neighborhood-level electoral data to test our model and to demonstrate how the intersection of the personal vote, redistricting, and short-term environmental variables can provide a healthy margin to incumbents,or end their careers. [source]