Candidate uncertainty, mental models, and complexity: Some experimental results

Since the work of Downs (1957), spatial models of elections have been a mainstay of research in political science and public choice. Despite the plethora of theoretical and empirical research involving spatial models, researchers have not considered in great detail the complexity of the decision task that a candidate confronts. Two facets of a candidate’s decision process are investigated here, using a set of laboratory experiments where subjects face a fixed incumbent in a two-dimensional policy space. First, we analyze the effect that the complexity of the electoral landscape has on the ability of the subject to defeat the incumbent. Second, we analyze the impact that a subject’s “mental model” (which we infer from a pre-experiment questionnaire) has on her performance. The experimental results suggest that the complexity of a candidate’s decision task and her perception of the task may be important factors in electoral competition.     

Economic voting in multi-level contexts: Evidence from Kerala and West Bengal in India

What determines electoral support for national incumbent parties and state-level challengers in sub-national pro-poor contexts? Based on survey data from the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal, collected prior to the 2019 national election, we find that voters were more (less) inclined to vote for the sub-national incumbent relative to the national incumbent if their household economic conditions were perceived to have improved (deteriorated) relative to national economic conditions. Our findings indicate that voters in these settings correctly assume that the sub-national incumbent cannot be held responsible for changes in national economic conditions, but, at the same time, the existence of a strong welfare state at the sub-national level creates expectations that the sub-national government is responsible for personal welfare. Hence, the national election is used to assess the economic performance of both the sub-national and the national incumbent.     

Two-round elections, one-round determinants? Evidence from the French municipal elections

Using a new database of French municipalities that covers 821 towns and two elections (2001 and 2008), we examine how the budget structure, degree of electoral competition and the economic context affect the share of votes for the incumbent. We take into account the institutional details of the two-round structure of the electoral process created by French electoral rules (dual ballot under plurality rules). We show that in the first round of the electoral process, spending on equipment (including infrastructures) can influence the voter, and that electoral competition has a strong impact on the incumbent’s score. In the second round, the incumbent’s vote is affected more by national considerations and local budget variables have no effect. We show that the dynamics between the first and the second rounds are intense. The results suggest that the determinants of each round’s outcome in a two-round electoral process are different.     

The incumbency dilemma and rent extraction by legislators

An incumbent is able to shirk or otherwise obtain rents based on his tenure of office because more senior representatives are better able to advance their legislative agendas than are more junior members. The realization of incumbent rents implies that an electoral prisoners' dilemma occurs at the level of voters across electoral districts. Pivotal voters in each district would benefit if all incumbents were replaced by challengers with similar legislative programs because the cost of incumbent rents can be avoided, but each benefits if his representative has more seniority than those from other districts.     

Money,candidates, and mayoral elections

In this paper, we extend a well-trod line of research from congressional and state-level elections—the electoral impact of campaign expenditures and candidate characteristics—to a relatively understudied context, urban mayoral elections. Using a sample of large U.S. cities, we provide evidence that mayoral elections are very similar to elections at other levels of office: there is a tremendous incumbency advantage, one that is overcome only with great effort; campaign spending is closely tied to incumbent vote share but it is challenger rather than incumbent spending that seems to drive outcomes; and challengers are hopelessly outspent. In addition, we find that the effect of local economic conditions on incumbent success is mediated by challenger spending and that incumbent candidates fare better in racially diverse settings.     

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.     

Leasehold or Freehold? Leader-Eviction Rules in the British Conservative and Labour Parties

This paper examines how leader-eviction rules affect the security of tenure of party leaders in the British Conservative and Labour parties. It sets out a framework for analysing and comparing eviction rules based on the political risks and institutional costs incurred by challengers and selectors alike in removing incumbents. Entering a contest entails mobilisation costs as challengers seek the backing of allies. Political risks are increased for the incumbent's rivals if they must stand directly against the incumbent in a contest. In contrast, rules that separate incumbent eviction and replacement enable rivals to freeride on the evicting efforts of other actors, significantly diminishing the incumbent's security of tenure. This paper looks at three systems: the Labour Party's electoral college, the Conservative Party's parliamentary ballot system and the Tories' new parliamentary mass-membership hybrid. High nomination barriers and the necessity to challenge the incumbent directly make Labour leaders secure. Eviction costs are lower in the two Conservative systems. This paper also argues that a party's eviction rules must be viewed in the context of its broader internal distribution of power: as party leaders gain more power over decision-making, raising barriers to challengers may simply encourage internal opponents to rebel or exit.     

Dominant Party Strategy and Democratization

How do incumbent parties strategize against challengers when a new partisan cleavage cuts across the incumbent's electoral coalition? This article argues that a two‐dimensional extension of Riker's anticoordination thesis conflicts with Downsian extensions. It shows that when voters coordinate on a single challenger based on their shared preference on a cross‐cutting cleavage, a vote‐maximizing incumbent party should move away from the challenger on the primary dimension of competition, even at the risk of abandoning the center. The article develops this hypothesis with reference to dominant parties in competitive authoritarian regimes where challenger parties constantly attempt “heresthetical” moves by mobilizing regime issues into the partisan debate, and it tests the predictions with an original sample survey of national leaders of Mexico's Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). It also spells out the implications of the findings for dominant party survivability in democratic transitions and, more broadly, for incumbents' spatial strategies in the face of new partisan cleavages.     

Quality Counts: Extending the Strategic Politician Model of Incumbent Deterrence

Competitive elections are essential to representative democracy. Competition in U.S. House elections is low in part because incumbents have strategic advantages that deter strong potential candidates from running. Many observers conclude that incumbents retain their seats without full accountability to the electorate, but the mechanisms of deterrence have never been fully explored from the perspective of strong potential candidates. Based on a survey of potential House candidates designed to capture perceptions of incumbents' personal quality and reelection prospects, we find strong evidence for the "strategic politicians" thesis ( Black 1972 ; Jacobson and Kernell 1983 ). We extend the logic of the strategic model first by showing that incumbents' reelection prospects are affected by their personal quality and second by demonstrating that incumbents' personal qualities deter strong challengers from running, independent of their electoral prospects. Our findings prompt us to suggest revisions to our understanding of competition and representation in contemporary House elections .     

In the right place,at the right time: Opportunity structures and candidates’ chances of getting elected for the first time

The foundational principle of representative democracy is that legislative elites can be replaced in elections. Yet, first-time parliamentary entries have received little attention. We present the first systematic attempt to examine the conditions of first-time parliamentary entry in multimember district PR systems. We introduce an overlooked explanatory factor, candidates' short-term opportunity structure. While controlling for personal vote-earning attributes (PVEAs), we examine how competitive context shapes newcomers' chances in a pure OLPR system where party elites cannot skew competition between candidates. Our register-based analysis of candidacies in seven Finnish parliamentary elections (1995–2019, n = 7548) shows that while personal qualities enhance candidates’ chances, first-time entry is restricted by the competitive context, especially the decisions of incumbent MPs. The strong impact of exceptional PVEAs suggests that other “big fish” candidates may also shape competitive contexts. Overall, the study indicates that electoral competition can be rather restricted even in the most competitive electoral systems.     

Does Quality Matter? Challengers in State Supreme Court Elections

We assess whether quality challengers in state supreme court elections have a significant impact on the electoral successes of incumbents and whether the electorate seemingly makes candidate-based evaluations in these races. To address these questions, we examine 208 elections to the states' highest courts from 1990 through 2000 in the 21 states using partisan or nonpartisan elections to staff their benches. From a Heckman two-stage estimation procedure that takes into account factors influencing challengers' decisions to run as well as factors affecting the electorate's choices among candidates, we find that quality does matter. Experienced challengers significantly lessen the electoral security of incumbents, and the electorate appears to evaluate challengers' qualifications. These findings stand in stark relief to traditional notions that the electorate is incapable of responding to candidate stimuli beyond incumbency and that judicial elections inherently are an ineffective means for securing popular control over the bench.     

Asymmetric partisan advantage and limited strategic calculation: Why Republican challengers appear unresponsive to national partisan trend

The notion that electorally experienced House challengers are guided by estimates of electoral prospects' influence on their probability of victory is now familiar (Jacobson and Kernell, 1983; Jacobson, 1987, 1989, 1990). Recently, Jacobson (1989, 1990) also uncovered a puzzling asymmetry in strategic behavior: experienced Democratic challengers are responsive to national performance indicators, but not Republican. It seems, however, highly unlikely that strategic behavior is asymmetric. I assume the increase national partisan trend gives to a candidate's electoral prospects is tied to district competitiveness; therefore, any competitive advantage should result in a greater boost in the electoral prospects for the advantaged party. It follows that a lopsided reward for partisan trend should also offer a greater incentive for electorally experienced candidates of the advantaged party to challenge House incumbents. I test, and the findings support, the hypothesis that Democrats enjoy this advantage. The results offer strong circumstantial evidence for the explanation of Jacobson's puzzle.     

Retrospective voting: An experimental study

This essay reports on some experiments designed to study two candidate electoral competition when voters are ‘retrospective’ voters. The experiments consist of a sequence of elections in which subjects play the part of both voters and candidates. In each election the incumbent adopts a policy position in a one-dimensional policy space, and voters are paid (on the basis of single peaked utility function over that space) for the position adopted by the incumbent. Neither voters nor candidates are informed of the voter utility functions, and the only information received by the voter is the payoff he has received from the present and previous incumbent administrations. Despite the severely limited information of candidates and voters, we find that, generally, candidates converge toward the median voter ideal point.     

Malapportionment and democracy: A curvilinear relationship

This article examines electoral malapportionment by illuminating the relationship between malapportionment level and democracy. Although a seminal study rejects this relationship, we argue that a logical and empirically significant relationship exists, which is curvilinear and is based on a framework focusing on incumbent politicians' incentives and the constraints they face regarding malapportionment. Malapportionment is lowest in established democracies and electoral authoritarian regimes with an overwhelmingly strong incumbent; it is relatively high in new democracies and authoritarian regimes with robust opposition forces. The seminal study's null finding is due to the mismatch between theoretical mechanisms and choice of democracy indices. Employing an original cross-national dataset, we conduct regression analyses; the results support our claims. Furthermore, on controlling the degree of democracy, the single-member district system's effects become insignificant. Australia, Belarus, the Gambia, Japan, Malaysia, Tunisia, and the United States illustrate the political logic underlying curvilinear relations at democracy's various levels.     

Support for radical parties in Western Europe: Structural conflicts and political dynamics

Why is the populist radical left and right on the rise across western Europe? Integrating theories on changing socio-political conflict with arguments about crises of political representation, we contend that electoral support for radical right and radical left parties is rooted in two distinct sets of socio-structural factors, but their translation into electoral choice is in both cases conditioned by the individual political discontent that originates in specific political dynamics. Relying on the European Social Survey (ESS) covering the period from 2002 to 2016 and Parlgov data, we show that the lack of responsiveness of mainstream parties to the changing social conflict structure provides critical opportunities for new challengers from both the radical left and the radical right, while voters’ political discontent only works to heighten their success when these parties are in opposition. Our article contributes not only by offering an integrative account of the electoral appeal of the radical right and radical left parties. In emphasising the largely similar nature of short-term, political factors that condition the translation of the different sets of long-term, structural determinants into opting for these parties, critically, this article also contributes to understanding the electoral success of radical challengers across western Europe.     

Additional incumbent spending really can harm (at least some) incumbents: An analysis of vote share maximization

The literature on the effects of campaign expenditures on electoral outcomes implicitly suggests that incumbent spending cannot have a negative marginal impact on the incumbent's vote share. Indeed, that literature has spent a great deal of effort finding positive and significant effects of incumbent spending. This paper shows that there are circumstances under which theory predicts zero and even negative impacts of incumbent spending. Estimating equations derived from the theory provide strong support for the base model, though only weak support for the extensions which predict nonpositive marginal products for incumbents.     

Congressional campaign effects on candidate recognition and evaluation

To date, most congressional scholars have relied upon a standard model of American electoral behavior developed in the presidential setting. This research extends our knowledge of Congressmen's incumbency advantages and their sources. Candidate preference is viewed as a function of the relative recognition and evaluation of incumbents and their challengers, as well as of Democrats and Republicans. In the recognition model, contact with voters and media effects are quite important, but there is no direct role for party identification. Evaluation is a function of personal contact and party identification, and media variables are insignificant. Relative recognition, relative evaluation, and party identification are three important predictors of candidate preference, and incumbency itself adds little beyond what is contained in incumbent recognition and evaluation advantages.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1980 annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, San Francisco, March 1980.     

The effects of party competition on budget outcomes: Empirical evidence from local governments in Spain

This paper investigates the link between local budget outcomes and the intensity of party competition, measured as the margin of victory obtained by the incumbent in the previous local election (i.e. the difference between the vote share and 50%). Two competing hypotheses are tested in the paper. On the one hand, the Leviathan government hypothesis suggests that the lower the intensity of party competition is, the greater is the increase in the size of the local public sector, irrespective of the ideology of the party in power. On the other hand, the Partisan government hypothesis suggests that the incumbent will find it easier to advance its platform when intensity of competition is low (i.e., parties on the left/right will increase/decrease the size of the local public sector when the intensity of the challenge from the opposition is low). These hypotheses are tested with information on spending, own revenues and deficit for more than 500 Spanish local governments over 8 years (1992–1999), and information on the results of two local electoral contests (1991 and 1995). The evidence favors the Partisan hypothesis over the Leviathan one. We found that, for left-wing governments, spending, taxes and deficits increased as the electoral margin increases; whereas, for right-wing governments, a greater margin of victory led to reductions in all these variables.     

Do voters affect or elect policies? A new perspective, with evidence from the U.S. Senate

Using quasi-experimental evidence from close elections, Lee et al. (2004) - henceforth LMB - argue competition for voters in U.S. House elections does not affect policy positions, as incumbent Senate candidates do not vote more extremely if elected than non-incumbents. Despite stronger electoral competition and greater legislative independence, similar results, shown here, hold for the Senate. Yet, the hypothesis that voters do not affect policies conflicts with how Senators moderate their positions prior to their next election. LMB-style estimates appear to be biased downwards as junior members of Congress prefer to vote more extremely than senior members, independently of their electoral strength. Corrected estimates are more favorable to the hypothesis that candidates moderate their policy choices in response to electoral competition.     

Do barriers to candidacy reduce political competition? Evidence from a bachelor’s degree requirement for legislators in Pakistan

In the 2002 election, candidates for Pakistan’s federal legislature had to possess at least a bachelor’s degree. This policy disqualified 60 out of the 207 incumbent legislators from running for election again. Using a difference-in-differences approach with panel data on all electoral constituencies in Pakistan, I find that this ballot access restriction does not affect political competition across all constituencies with disqualified incumbents equally. Stronger political competition is defined as a larger number of candidates contesting election, a smaller vote share and vote margin for the winning candidate, and a less concentrated candidate field, as measured by a Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) of vote shares. Competition declined significantly in constituencies where the disqualified incumbent belonged to a small party and where literacy levels were lower (signifying a smaller pool of substitute candidates). However, political competition increased in areas where the disqualified incumbent was stronger in terms of his winning vote margin.