Decomposing the Sources of Incumbency Advantage in the U. S. House

The disadvantaged incumbents: estimating incumbency effects in Indian state legislatures

“…There is evidence that the incumbency advantage is greater after the mid-1960s (Cover 1977;Erikson 1971Erikson , 1972; Gelman and King 1990; Levitt and Wolfram 1997). However, the evidence from outside the United States does not support an intrinsic advantage to incumbency.…”

“…Levitt and Wolfram (1997) point out in relation to the elections in the United States that first, an incumbent is likely to be of higher quality, on average, compared to an open seat candidate, and second, seats contested by incumbents will attract weaker challengers as compared to the open seats. A failure to control for candidate quality, hence, will overestimate the incumbency effect.…”

Cheap seats: the Democratic Party's advantage in U.S. House elections

“…A more sophisticated analysis of the incumbency advantage con ducted by (Levitt and Wolfram, 1996) has produced similar estimates. By their estimation, incumbency was worth 3.4 percentage points of the vote in contested elections from 1948 to 1958, 4 percentage points from 1960 through 1968, 6.8 percentage points from 1970 through 1978, and 8 percentage points from 1980 through 1990.…”

The Effects of Redistricting on Incumbents

“…It shows the incumbency advantage, measured using the method in Levitt and Wolfram (1997), for U.S. House races, \higher" statewide o±ces, and \lower" statewide o±ces. 10 We estimate the incumbency advantage for each group separately for each decade.…”