Disentangling the Personal and Partisan Incumbency Advantages: Evidence from Close Elections and Term Limits

Abstract

Although the scholarly literature on incumbency advantages focuses on personal advantages, the partisan incumbency advantage -the electoral benefit accruing to non-incumbent candidates by virtue of being from the incumbent party -is also an important electoral factor. Understanding this phenomenon is important for evaluating the role of parties vs. individuals in U.S. elections and the incentives of incumbents and their parties in the legislature, among other things. In this paper, we define the partisan incumbency advantage, explain its possible role in elections, and show how it confounds previous estimates of the personal incumbency advantage. We then exploit close elections in conjunction with term limits in U.S. state legislatures to separately estimate the personal and partisan incumbency advantages. The personal advantage is perhaps larger than previously thought, and the partisan advantage is indistinguishable from zero and possibly negative. * We thank Steve Ansolabehere and Jim Snyder for sharing data and providing helpful comments and support. We also thank

Identifying the Source of Incumbency Advantage Through an Electoral Reform

“…Parties thus appear to play a secondary role which also explains the preferred strategy of nominating incumbent candidates evidenced by their high rerunning rates. These results are in line with Fowler and Hall (2012), who also find no partisan incumbency advantage and possibly a certain disadvantage for U.S. state legislative elections. Also, term limits appear to have a measurable causal effect in deterring the electorate from voting for the incumbent party.…”

“…3 The paper hence follows a relatively new branch of the literature that acknowledges the shortcomings in Lee (2008) and attempts to causally estimate personal and/or partisan incumbency advantage (Erikson and Titiunik, 2014;Fowler and Hall, 2012). municipalities had binding term limits, i. e. received treatment.…”

“…As pointed out in Fowler and Hall (2012), partisan and personal incumbency are, often and nonrandomly, jointly assigned. Term limits are a reliable instrument in disentangling the two by means of exogenously breaking the link between the incumbent party and its incumbent candidate.…”

Koncept incumbency advantage v českých senátních volbách

“…Jelikož bude, jak popíšeme dále, koncept výhody obhájce spojen v naší práci spíše s osobnostmi (Fowler a Hall 2012), a tím pádem zejména většinovými volebními systémy, připadá v úvahu pro ČR pouze aplikace na volby senátní z důvodu pojetí konceptu jako výhody pro konkrétního kandidáta, který obhajuje mandát (ne stranické výhody, viz níže). To můžeme hodnotit jako výzvu, jelikož prozatím žádná ze studií nevěnovala pozornost vícestranické soutěži za užití dvoukolového většinového volebního systému.…”

“…Mezi tyto autory se řadí např. Fowler a Hall (2012), kteří ve svém textu zjišťují (ovšem měřeno opět pro americké legislativní volby), že výhoda pro jednotlivce je nepoměrně vyšší, než je tomu v případě stranické výhody, která je dle nich zanedbatelná. K měření osobní výhody používají již zmíněné koncepty SS a RS, které však dle nich měří pouze tzv.…”