Incumbency and the Probability of Reelection in State Legislative Elections

Abstract

We build on work estimating and explaining the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Our work makes advances in three ways. First, our model measures the effect of incumbency on the probability of reelection, rather than on candidate vote share or margin of victory. Second, we accommodate both multimember district (MMD) elections that are excluded from most previous studies and uncontested and partially contested (MMD) races. Third, we use an improved method of controlling for the underlying partisan makeup of districts. We calculate incumbency advantage using data from elections in 96 legislative chambers across 49 states in the 1992-1994 electoral cycle. We then model relative incumbency advantage across the states as a function of institutional characteristics. We find that district type, term length, and electoral formula have substantial effects on incumbent safety; incumbents in multimember post and free-for-all districts are more vulnerable than those in traditional SMDs, as are those with four-year, rather than two-year, terms. Professionalization also affects incumbency safety, and salary rather than other resources best accounts for incumbency advantage.How much does incumbency improve electoral prospects for state legislators, and why? In the last 10 years, following earlier work on U.S. congressional elections, students of state legislatures have made substantial progress in estimating and explaining the extent to which incumbency augments the vote shares of state legislators who run for reelection. In this paper, we build on these advances in three important ways. First, we offer a model to estimate and explain the effect of incumbency on the probability of reelection, rather than on

Closing the Gap in State Legislative Races: The Effect of Campaign Spending on Ballot Drop-off

“…Extensive research has gone into testing the significance of professionalism within legislatures. However, researchers struggle with how to measure the component parts that make up professionalism (Carey et al, 2000). In addition, analysis of professionalism is most often used when looking at cross-sectional data across states, and is directed at the professionalism of the chamber itself.…”

“…Some argue that incumbency ties into the idea of professionalism, and that incumbents are more likely to understand how to strategically use resources to win (Troustine, 2009). Others argue that there are a multitude of mitigating factors like district size, term length and electoral formula that significantly impact the value of incumbency (Carey et al, 2000). This research tends to focus on margin of victory, rather than on direct turnout effects of incumbency.…”

“…A part of this problem was remedied in 1987 by the Inter-university Consortium for Political Science Research (ISPSR) with the creation of a database with state legislative election results from 1968 to 1986 (Carey et al, 2000). However, barriers to analysis at this level continue to be considered "severe" by researchers (Austin et al, 1991).…”

The changing demographic, legal, and technological contexts of political representation

“…Alternatively, one could also draw a plan with three safe districts for each party and four ''competitive'' districts that a candidate from either party had an equal chance to win. Even the definition of a ''competitive'' district is difficult, however, because incumbent representatives win reelection much more easily than challengers (8,9).…”

Incumbency Disadvantages (Local Election and Populism in Indonesia)

“…Though, some of its resources and advantages are not owned by the challenger [1]. In many cases incumbents have a significant increase in the number of votes compared to previous elections, allowing the incumbent to be re-elected [2,3,4]. Despite the fact that the development of democracy has made the elections more competitive so often the incumbent position does not guarantee to always win the election [5].…”