Legislative scholars have investigated both the growth in the incumbency advantage since the early 1970s and its decline in recent decades, but there are several unanswered questions about this phenomenon. In this paper, we examine the incumbency advantage across a much wider swath of history to better understand its connection with changing levels of electoral nationalization. Based on an analysis of U.S. House elections extending back to the antebellum era, we find that the incumbency advantage fluctuates in predictable ways over time with changes in nationalization, which can be a product of both institutional and political conditions. We also demonstrate that the increased influence of local forces in congressional elections may not be strictly necessary nor sufficient for the existence of an incumbency advantage.

In this note, we revisit the work of Carson and Crespinto examine the effect of different redistricting plans on competitiveness in U.S. House elections. Similar to the previous results, our probit estimates on an expanded dataset that includes redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012 reveal that commission and court-drawn districts experience more competition on average than those drawn by legislatures. These results provide additional support for the hypothesis that one way to increase the competitiveness of congressional elections is to allow extra-legislative bodies to draw congressional district boundaries.

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Despite winning the presidency in 2016, Donald Trump alleged “millions of illegal votes” and other election fraud. He continued using this rhetoric throughout his tenure as president and ultimately suggested that if he did not win reelection in 2020, it would be because it somehow was stolen from him. Through an original survey experiment, this article explores how such allegations of fraud influence the public’s attitudes toward the conduct of elections, election outcomes, representation, and democracy as a whole. In doing so, we found that respondents expressed significantly and substantively more negative attitudes toward elections and democracy after being exposed to claims of fraud (even without evidence). Additionally, Republican identifiers were more likely than Democrats or Independents to doubt that their vote was counted fairly. These results bear important implications for our current understanding of politics in the United States.

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