You just made it: Individual incumbency advantage under Proportional Representation

Using close election outcomes, we identify a personal effect of incumbency on the probability of seeking election, and seeking and winning office in subsequent elections for elected officials in an Open List Proportional System. In many cases Danish local elections creates an as-if random distribution of candidates that are elected or not, which is an ideal setting for a Regression Discontinuity design. The incumbency advantage has been studied to a great extent, though primarily in pluralistic electoral systems, while more recent studies have extended the scope to Proportional Representation systems. This study adds to this budding literature by showing an advantage in a new context and focusing on candidate level electoral returns under conditions where candidates are arguably least likely to benefit from incumbency.     

Does electoral competition affect politicians’ trade policy preferences? Evidence from Japan

This study examines the effect of electoral competition on politicians’ trade policy preferences using candidate observations from the House of Representatives in Japan’s 2012 general election. The study clarifies the effects of constituency size and the electoral strength of constituencies on candidates’ political stances. The empirical results provide evidence that politicians’ preferences for trade policy are sensitive to electoral pressure, but their reactions differ depending on the characteristics of each constituency. The results reveal that for a broad constituency with a large concentration of agricultural workers, election candidates are more likely to support protectionism than their counterparts running in a narrow constituency. For city district election candidates, electoral strength measured by the vote margin significantly affects their trade policy preferences. Candidates in close elections are more likely to be protectionist than candidates elected by a substantial majority, suggesting that electoral pressures deter politicians from supporting trade liberalization.     

Japan's new electoral system:: la plus ça change . . .

We examine the impact on parties and candidates of Japan's new electoral rules, first used in the 1996 House of Representatives election. We argue that the Japanese rules, which not only permit dual candidacy but also allow votes cast in the single member district (SMD) portion of the race to allocate proportional representation (PR) seats to dual candidates, effectively defeat the purposes of electoral reform. The new arrangement transforms PR representatives into locally-based politicians who will rely on personalistic rather than party-based or programmatic campaigning, effectively converts single-member districts back into the multi-member districts of the past, enhances incumbency advantage, and will push the ratio of candidates to seats down as low or even lower than before.     

The impact of incumbency on turnout. Evidence from Italian municipalities

We analyse how the presence of an incumbent among candidates at an election affects electoral turnout. We use a rich data set which provides information on the results of Italian municipal elections over the period 1993–2011. We find that the impact of incumbency is heterogeneous across geographical areas: incumbency produces a positive effect on turnout in the South of Italy, whereas we find a negative and statistically significant effect in the North. We speculate that the north-south divergence is related to differences in social capital and in clientelistic relationships established by incumbent politicians. Our conjecture finds support when we look separately at municipalities in the lower and upper quartile of the social capital distribution and at municipalities with high or low densities of organised crime.     

The electoral consequences of racial fluidity

Brazilian politicians have seemingly adopted new racial identities en masse in recent years. What are the electoral consequences of asserting membership in a new racial group? In the Brazilian case, politicians who change how they racially identify themselves and secure greater access to campaign resources may become more electorally competitive. If voters learn a politician has changed their self-declared race, however, the politician’s reputation is likely to be tarnished and their chances of victory are likely to decline. Building on evidence that voters acquire greater information about election front-runners in high-profile contests than other types of politicians, I expect incumbents running for executive offices who change how they publicly identify themselves to suffer an electoral penalty. Drawing on data from local elections in Brazil, I find limited evidence that voters penalize city council candidates who adopt new racial identities. I show that incumbent mayors seeking reelection, however, receive significantly fewer votes after they assert membership in new racial groups.     

A Natural Experiment in Proposal Power and Electoral Success

Does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes? Observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes, since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill. We take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the Canadian House of Commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes. The right of noncabinet members to propose legislation is assigned by lottery. Comparing outcomes between those who were granted the right to propose and those who were not, we show that incumbents of the governing party enjoy a 2.7 percentage point bonus in vote total in the election following their winning the right to introduce a single piece of legislation, which translates to a 7% increase in the probability of winning. The causal effect results from higher likeability among constituents. These results demonstrate experimentally that what politicians do as lawmakers has a causal effect on electoral outcomes.     

Electoral incentives and elite racial identification: Why Brazilian politicians change their race

Scholars recognize that individuals change how they racially identify themselves over time and even from situation to situation. Politicians, however, are typically presumed to have stable, innate racial identities. In this article, I contend that politicians strategically change their self-professed race in response to electoral incentives. Using original data from Brazilian elections, I show that more than a quarter of the political candidates that competed in Brazil’s 2014 and 2016 elections changed their publicly declared race from one election to the next. My analysis indicates the racial composition of the electorate and the electoral rules that govern competition affect patterns of racial change. These results suggest that candidates “racially position” themselves as members of the racial group that provides the greatest electoral rewards. This strategic behavior calls into question extant theories which assume elite racial group membership is fixed and exogenous to electoral outcomes.     

The accountability effect of endorsements: A survey experiment

Do endorsements from incumbent politicians to co-partisans lead to more electoral accountability for the performance of the government? I use a randomized experiment embedded in a national survey conducted before the 2012 Mexican general election to examine the effect of endorsements by the outgoing president Felipe Calderón to the Senate candidates of his Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). Results show that among PAN identifiers, the incumbent vote is more tightly linked to the performance of the president when voters are exposed to the endorsement. I improve on the current standing of the accountability literature by showing that the relationship between an outgoing politician and the candidates of her party matters for electoral sanctioning. My findings imply that politicians’ strategic decisions have an effect on how voters assign responsibility: By nominating candidates without close ties to the endorser in cases of weak government performance, parties can use nominations strategically to diffuse responsibility.     

Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation

This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.     

Leadership Experiences Within Civil Organizations and Candidacy in Public Elections: Causal Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Approach

Standing as a candidate in public elections has been characterized as the ultimate act of political participation. We test the hypothesis that acquiring office within civil organizations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. In order to take self-selection problems into account, we provide quasi-experimental evidence using election discontinuities, in which we compare the likelihood of being nominated for public office between closely ranked winners and losers in Swedish student union (SU) elections. Our original data cover 5,000 SU candidates and register data on their candidacies in public elections (1991–2010). The analysis provides support to the hypothesis: Students elected to SU councils were about 34 percent (6 percentage points) more likely to become a candidate in a public election than SU council candidates who were not elected. The causal impact is fairly stable over time. The analysis makes important contributions to two interrelated bodies of literature: First, it provides political recruitment literature with causal evidence that acquiring leadership experiences at arenas outside of representative democratic institutions facilitate entry into election processes. Second, it provides strong evidence to an increasingly contested issue within political participation research by showing that certain organizational activities increase individuals’ political involvement.     

Campaign resources and electoral success: Evidence from the 2002 French parliamentary elections

We examine the factors that improve the candidates’ likelihood of winning an election by drawing on information from campaign resources used by candidates running in the 2002 French parliamentary election. The main effects that we wish to analyze are the candidates’ gender, political affiliation and possible incumbency. We find that the contributions the candidates received and their political affiliations determine their acceding to the second round of the elections. But surprisingly once they make it to the second round, the contributions cease to be relevant; only the candidates’ gender, incumbency and the actual spending rather than the contribution levels matter.     

Incumbency advantage in multi-member districts: Evidence from congressional elections in Chile

Do parties enjoy an advantage to incumbency in multi-member districts? In this paper we answer this question by adapting a regression-discontinuity design to multi-member districts in congressional elections in Chile. The electoral system in place generates discontinuities in the number of elected representatives from each coalition at the 1/3 and 2/3 thresholds of the two-party vote share. Regression-discontinuity estimates indicate that, by holding two seats as opposed to holding only one, the left-leaning coalition obtains an extra 4.5% vote share in the next election and increases by 28 percentage points the probability of electing two candidates again. These results are in line with those obtained in previous studies in the U.S. but contrast with results obtained in developing countries which find a negative advantage to incumbency.     

Individual Autonomy and Local-Level Solidarity in Africa

Come election time, many localities in Africa seem to speak with one voice. Vote totals often suggest near-unanimity within villages and neighborhoods, even when national-level results demonstrate greater competitiveness. However, there is substantial variation in the electoral solidarity of local communities, with some demonstrating significantly less cohesion than others. Few if any scholars have tried to explain this variation. I theorize that solidarity levels are largely a function of community members' abilities to act autonomously. Namely, communities will be more likely to vote en bloc when residents are less able to resist pressures from local elites, who often act as brokers for national politicians, due to elite-empowering land-tenure regimes, poverty, and information scarcity. I test this theory with data from Uganda, which displays significant variation in local-level electoral solidarity. I find that electoral solidarity is lower in communities where freehold land arrangements are more common, living standards are higher, and mass media (i.e., radio signals) are more accessible.     

Young adults' under-representation in elections to the U.S. House of Representatives

The U.S. House of Representatives has one of the oldest pools of politicians in the world today: the average member of the House is 58 years at the time of their election, which is about 20 years older than the average American. But why are younger adults scarce among these representatives? Here we trace the relative absence of youth in both the primary and general elections of 2020 using a supply and demand framework. Our study finds that (1) the average candidate is much older than the average citizen and (2) young candidates perform less well than older candidates in both primaries and general elections. These results suggest that youth are disadvantaged because the two main parties do not nominate enough younger adults as candidates for winnable and safe seats. Young adults also seem to be disadvantaged indirectly at the electoral stage because they lack electoral capital (experience in running for and holding office) and tend to suffer strongly from the incumbency advantage of their opponents. We infer from these findings that barring reforms to rules governing minimum candidate ages and term limits, the under-representation of youth in U.S. national-level politics will continue for the foreseeable future.     

Getting Personal? The Impact of Social Media on Preferential Voting

Ever since the successful presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, attention has been drawn to the political impact of social media. However, it remains to be seen whether the successful Obama campaign is the exception or the rule. Our research focuses specifically on the impact of social media on preference voting. First it seeks to establish whether candidates make use of social media during election campaigns and whether voters in turn follow politicians. Afterwards it examines to what extent social media make a difference and yield a preference vote bonus. Theoretically, two types of effects are outlined, namely a direct effect of the number of followers a candidate has and a statistical interaction effect whereby a higher number of followers only yields more votes when the candidate actively uses the social media. To carry out our analysis, we make use of a unique dataset that combines data on social media usage and data on the candidates themselves (such as position on the list, being wellknown, exposure to the old media, gender, ethnicity and incumbency). The dataset includes information on all 493 candidates of the 10 parties that received at least one seat in the Dutch 2010 election. It turns out that candidates are eager to use social media, but that relatively few people follow candidates. There is a significant interaction effect of social media usage and the number of followers, but that effect appears to be relatively small.     

Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

This article outlines a method for forecasting British general elections from national level vote shares at local elections. Although local elections are notionally ‘local’, the evidence suggests that they at least partly mirror national electoral fortunes. A simple general election vote share on local election vote share regression model that accounts for partisan differences and incumbency effects fits past data with reasonable accuracy. Based on the results of the 2013 and 2014 local elections, the model forecast a 56% probability of hung parliament, with a 78% probability of the Conservatives receiving the largest share of the vote.     

Name Recognition and Candidate Support

The mass media devote a great deal of attention to high‐profile elections, but in American political life such elections are the exception, not the rule. The majority of electoral contests feature candidates who are relative unknowns. In such situations, does name recognition breed contempt, indifference, or affection? Existing work presents modest theory and mixed evidence. Using three laboratory experiments, we provide conclusive evidence that name recognition can affect candidate support, and we offer strong evidence that a key mechanism underlying this relationship is inferences about candidate viability. We further show that the name‐recognition effect dissipates in the face of a more germane cue, incumbency. We conclude with a field study that demonstrates the robustness of the name‐recognition effect to a real‐world political context, that of yard signs and a county election.     

Who Cheats? Who Loots? Political Competition and Corruption in Japan, 1947–1993

When do politicians resort to corrupt practices? This article distinguishes between two types of corruption by politicians: illegal acts for material gain (looting) and illegal acts for electoral gain (cheating). Looting generally involves a politician “selling” influence while cheating involves a politician “buying” votes. Individual‐level analyses of new data on financial scandals and election law violations in Japan show that the determinants of cheating differ from the determinants of looting. Most notably, political experience and electoral security increase the probability of looting, but electoral insecurity combined with intraparty competition increases the probability of cheating.     

The Campaign Value of Incumbency: A New Solution to the Puzzle of Less Effective Incumbent Spending

A puzzle in research on campaign spending is that while expenditure is positively related to votes won, this effect is far more strongly, or even exclusively, enjoyed by challengers rather than by incumbents. We unearth a new explanation for the puzzle, focusing on the hidden, yet variable, campaign value of office perquisites which incumbents deploy in their campaigns to win votes. When these variable office benefits are unobserved, then the effect is to make observed incumbent spending less effective than spending by challengers. Using data from the 2002 Irish general election, where incumbency was assigned a variable campaign value and included in declared campaign spending, we are able to demonstrate this hidden incumbency effect and estimate its relationship to electoral success, in terms of overall votes, share of votes, and probability of winning a seat. Contrary to previous research showing ineffective incumbent spending, we find that when the campaign value of office is also measured, public office value “spending” is not only very effective in winning votes, but also seems to be more effective than regular incumbent spending.     

The June 1999 European Parliament elections

In countries with a majoritarian electoral system, the expenses of challengers are generally found to have a stronger effect on the electoral outcome than the expenses of incumbents. Research on campaign expenditure effects in Brazil suggests that this is not the case in countries with an open list PR system and large districts. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of the effect of individual campaign expenses on the number of preferential votes in the 2003 legislative elections in Flanders/Belgium. An analysis of high quality candidates shows that the expenses have a substantial effect on the vote which does not vary according to incumbency status. However, the effect of media exposure on the vote is stronger than and largely independent of the effect of campaign expenses.