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It is well known that voters prefer parties whose policy positions align with their own. But do voters actually reward incumbents who implement policies preferred by the electorate? Using cross-country data covering more than 350 elections and opinion-policy congruence measures based on 166 issues, our analysis reveals an unexpected non-correlation between opinion-policy congruence and electoral success. Governments that implement (or keep in place) policies with higher levels of support in the electorate do not do better in subsequent elections. This result holds when controlling for the state of the economy, and when using other, country-specific, datasets. The study reinforces conclusions from previous research that retrospective policy voting seems to be very limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reconsiders the effects of uncontested elections on legislative behavior, based on a large dataset for 2002–2021 that was newly put together for Japan's prefectural assemblies. As uncontested politicians do not need to engage in as much constituency effort in vying for re-election, they may have additional time for intra-parliamentary work. However, although these incumbents were once elected without facing any rivals, they have some electoral vulnerability, as their seats may be challenged in future elections. I show that among those uncontested incumbents, the legislative performance is higher (lower) for those elected from districts of smaller (larger) magnitudes, as they are more (less) confident in their chances of re-election. My findings highlight the primacy of re-election motivations among uncontested politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German federal election 2021 was remarkable partly because the incumbent chancellor Angela Merkel, albeit still popular, was not running for re-election and did not figure prominently in the campaign. Drawing on the literatures on incumbency advantage, cost of ruling, and candidate-centered voting, we analyze whether an outgoing incumbent might still have an effect on voters' attitudes and behavior. We distinguish two phenomena: First, we expect the effects of outgoing incumbents on electoral behavior to wash off during campaigns, as voters get more informed and adjust to new candidates. Second, if the incumbent's successor as front-runner of their party manages to link themselves to their predecessor, the incumbent's reputation might rub off on the new candidate, possibly indirectly enhancing electoral fortunes of the party. We examine the dynamics of these phenomena using data from the panel and RCS components of the German Longitudinal Election Study and a large-scale survey experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voters need to be at least aware of candidates to hold them accountable. How does this work in mixed-member electoral systems where nominal votes often play a subordinate role and voters could entirely rely on party heuristics to choose between candidates? In lieu of existing causal explanations, we compile data on many factors contributing to candidate awareness and use a data-driven approach to identify variables that strongly predict voters' awareness of district candidates in the run-up of the German Federal Elections 2009, 2013 and 2017. We find factors that describe candidate-, voter-, and district characteristics politically to be important out-of-sample predictors in contrast to factors that describe them socio-demographically. Interestingly, we find that incumbency predicts candidate awareness, but it does not matter whether incumbents were elected nominally or via a party list. These findings can be a starting point for developing causal theories and have implications for our understanding of how voters perceive the different types of MPs a mixed-member electoral system generates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, African courts have played an important role in the conduct of free and fair elections. In Kenya, the Supreme Court nullified the presidential election of the incumbent. These rulings challenge the conventional wisdom that courts in hybrid regimes always support power holders despite blatant evidence of electoral fraud. Furthermore, these sparks of judicial resistance deserve our scholarly attention as they have the power to start the democratization process or limit further autocratization. Hence, this paper seeks to understand the conditions under which courts are able to resist incumbents' pressure to legitimize electoral malpractice and side with the opposition. I argue that institutional reforms incentivize courts to resist the incumbent's pressure and to rule in favor of the opposition during electoral disputes under two conditions. First, institutional reforms must reinforce de jure independence by enacting effective legal and constitutional mechanisms that prevent the executive branch from undermining the separation of power. Second, institutional reforms must mobilize judicial support networks by granting them the tools to engage in strategic and repeated litigation. I test this novel theory by leveraging original qualitative and quantitative data from Kenya. Using process tracing, I show how the 2010 constitution created an environment where the courts had no other choice than to annul the election of the incumbent – President Kenyatta – in 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract A vast literature shows that voting for the winning party in elections boosts satisfaction with democracy. But in many list PR systems, voters do not only vote for a party, they can also vote for candidates within parties. Yet, we know very little about how such votes affect voters' satisfaction with democracy. In this paper, we analyse pre- and post-election panel survey data from Belgium, in which we asked respondents to report their vote choice for parties and for candidates. The main finding is that casting a preference vote for a winning candidate makes little difference, as party-list voters are those with the largest increase in satisfaction with democracy. Such a finding is very important as reforms that increase voters' opportunities to vote for candidates within list have multiplied recently, and many of these reforms have been justified as being in line with voters' demand for more candidate-centred electoral systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract In this paper, we investigate the effect of incumbency in three different electoral settings in South Korea using a regression discontinuity (RD) design. We claim that incumbency provides advantages in local elections, but its positive effects diminish in national legislative elections. Local politicians have an opportunity to develop close ties with their constituents, insulating themselves from national politics; but, due to the centralized nature of national politics, members of the National Assembly do not. Consistent with our expectation, incumbency effects are generally positive in local elections, but insignificant or even negative in national legislative elections. We also find that politicians who previously held local elected office enjoy an incumbency advantage in national legislative elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Free list proportional representation is an electoral system that gives voters as many votes as there are seats, and allows the voter to distribute them anywhere on the ballot. Computing party support under this system can be complicated, since different electors possess and use different numbers of votes. As a result, national election results and derivatives thereof (e.g. electoral volatility) may be calculated incorrectly. Using a stylized illustration, we describe obstacles to vote aggregation under the free list and develop four approaches for counting votes. The first two, "naive aggregationˮ and the "fictional voterˮ technique, have known applications. We propose the third, which we call "weighted votesˮ, to deal with missing data about the number of voters. The last, "weighted preferencesˮ, has been used intermittently, and we offer a generalization for a broad range of applications. Applying these methods to Ecuadorian elections, our results reveal biases in certain approaches and inform the question of which method to use and under which circumstances. Lastly, we make publicly available a definitive set of district- and national-level election results for Ecuador over six elections from 1998 to 2017, thereby making it possible for the case to re-enter comparative cross-national research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract What are the effects of natural disasters on electoral results? Some authors claim that catastrophes have a negative effect on the survival of leaders in a democracy because voters have a propensity to punish politicians for not preventing or poorly handling a crisis. In contrast, this paper finds that these events might favor incumbents. Disasters are linked to leader survival through clientelism: they generate an in-flow of resources in the form of aid, which increases money for buying votes. Analyzing the rainy season of 2010–2011 in Colombia, considered its worst disaster in history, I use a difference-in-differences strategy to show that in the local election incumbent parties benefited from the disaster. The result is robust in regard to different specifications and alternative explanations. Moreover, I present evidence that goes against other common explanations found in the literature and that goes in line with the clientelism mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistricting has been the subject of a great deal of scholarship, conducted under the suspicion that redistricting has negative effects on voting behavior via mechanisms like competitiveness, incumbency, and partisan balance of the district. Most of this scholarship, however, falls short in measurement of the voter-level effects of redistricting and its different mechanisms. In this study, I test the effects of these mechanisms, and thus of redistricting as a whole, at the highly precise individual level and among different but significant subsets of voters. By predicting turnout with individual-level changes in competitiveness and candidate and district characteristics, this project specifies the impact of redistricting on voting behavior with a focus on the individual voter that has been missing from the literature. Redistricting in the state of Florida, which was subject to national legislative redistricting and reapportionment prior to the 2012 election, offers a valuable exogenous test by which changes in competitiveness, incumbency, and partisanship resulting from redistricting can be definitively assessed as drivers or depressors of turnout. Results indicate that while the overall effects of redistricting on individual turnout appear to be substantively low, the effects of changes in partisan composition in a voter's district that result from redistricting can decrease turnout likelihood by more than 4%. As such, these results call into question what it really means for a voter to be “redistricted.” This project precisely defines what aspects of the redistricting process are most consequential to an individual's voting behavior in a way that the previous literature has been unable to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine centre right and radical right party competition. We argue that centre right parties – particularly non-incumbents - recognise economic crises as electoral opportunities for radical right parties and respond with the strategic emphasis of immigration in mass appeals. To test this, we merge party performance data with expert surveys across 24 European Union countries to examine parties’ electoral performances during the 2008 economic crisis. We find that non-incumbent centre right parties benefited from emphasising immigration, performing better than radical right parties. Second, incumbent centre right parties that did not emphasise immigration lost out electorally, providing an opportunity for far-right parties to benefit from immigration in this economic context. Qualitative case studies further suggest that while these effects appear to be more pronounced in Western Europe, the results are consistent across the East and West. The findings suggest a reconsideration of immigration as an exclusive issue for far-right electoral success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues related to migration and ethnic diversity have become more important over the last years both politically and scientifically. One important issue regards the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on electoral turnout. Thus far, empirical studies analysing this effect in Europe have relied on the sole use of aggregate level data. I tackle this research gap by linking contextual neighbourhood data with individual voter data collected by the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES). Thus, this paper offers new insights into the role ethnic heterogeneity plays in political participation. Germany as an exemplary case has become of special interest regarding international migration after the steady increase of asylum seekers since 2013 and its consequent political reaction toward the influx of refugees. Results show that neighbourhoods that are ethnically more heterogeneous are significantly associated with lower individual electoral turnout, even when key variables influencing turnout at the individual level are held constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on vote-buying often assumes a complete transaction of cash for votes. While there is ample evidence that candidates target certain voters with cash handouts, it is unclear whether these actually result in higher turnout and vote-shares for the distributing party. Empirically, we find that cash handouts have a small to no effect on either turnout or vote-shares when using different matching techniques and accounting for district-level factors during the 2011 Beninese presidential election. We cross-validate these results with additional surveys from four other African countries (Kenya, Mali, Botswana, and Uganda). Results suggest that, at least in these contexts, vote-buying can be best understood as an incomplete transaction between candidates and voters, and that handouts from multiple parties as well as district-level traits (e.g. clientelism, public goods) partly account for the small effects observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incumbents appear to perform better in elections because they are incumbents, yet the most commonly proposed explanations for this phenomenon are unsatisfying. I introduce a new explanation that is simple, parsimonious, and largely consistent with empirical evidence. If voters lack perfect information about electoral candidates, incumbency is an informative signal of quality, and voters will update their beliefs accordingly. I formalize these claims with a decision-theoretic model where voters receive noisy signals of candidate quality, and I discuss several empirical phenomena consistent with this explanation. For example, when voters learn that their incumbent barely won office, they are less likely to support reelection and the effect of incumbency largely disappears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazilian politicians have seemingly adopted new racial identities en masse in recent years. What are the electoral consequences of asserting membership in a new racial group? In the Brazilian case, politicians who change how they racially identify themselves and secure greater access to campaign resources may become more electorally competitive. If voters learn a politician has changed their self-declared race, however, the politician's reputation is likely to be tarnished and their chances of victory are likely to decline. Building on evidence that voters acquire greater information about election front-runners in high-profile contests than other types of politicians, I expect incumbents running for executive offices who change how they publicly identify themselves to suffer an electoral penalty. Drawing on data from local elections in Brazil, I find limited evidence that voters penalize city council candidates who adopt new racial identities. I show that incumbent mayors seeking reelection, however, receive significantly fewer votes after they assert membership in new racial groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election violence is often conceptualized as a form of coercive campaigning, but the literature has not fully explored how electoral institutions shape incentives for competition and violence. We argue that the logic of subnational electoral competition – and with it incentives for violence – differs in presidential and legislative elections. In presidential elections, national-level considerations dominate incentives for violence. Presidential elections are usually decided by winning a majority of votes in a single, national district, incentivizing parties to demobilize voters with violence in strongholds. In contrast, election violence is subject to district-level incentives in legislative elections. District-level incentives imply that parties focus on winning the majority of districts, and therefore center violent campaigning on the most competitive districts. We test our argument with georeferenced, constituency-level data from Zimbabwe, a case that fits our scope conditions of holding competitive elections, violence by the incumbent, and majoritarian electoral rule. We find that most violence takes place in strongholds in presidential elections, especially in opposition strongholds. In contrast, competitive constituencies are targeted in legislative contests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use evidence from Indonesia's April 2014 legislative elections to study the relationship between incumbency, list position, candidate characteristics, and electoral success in open-list PR systems. Contrary to a recent literature identifying an incumbency disadvantage in other large developing democracies, we identify a consistent personal incumbency advantage in Indonesia. However, we argue that this advantage is mediated by party choices over how incumbents and newcomers are ranked on party lists, a key heuristic for voters in low-information electoral environments such as Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In marked contrast to the findings from advanced democracies that incumbent office holders enjoy electoral advantages, this study finds that a substantial incumbency disadvantage exists in South Korean National Assembly (KNA) elections. I employ a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design to distinguish the true effects of incumbency from the selection effects associated with candidate qualities, such as charisma and ability levels. My results show that serving a term in office reduces the probability of winning by around 20–30 percentage points and reduces the vote share by about 3–7 percentage points. Possible reasons for the incumbency disadvantage are briefly discussed, with an emphasis on the particularly high level of public discontent with governing elites in the KNA due to what voters perceive to be their widespread corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. House of Representatives has one of the oldest pools of politicians in the world today: the average member of the House is 58 years at the time of their election, which is about 20 years older than the average American. But why are younger adults scarce among these representatives? Here we trace the relative absence of youth in both the primary and general elections of 2020 using a supply and demand framework. Our study finds that (1) the average candidate is much older than the average citizen and (2) young candidates perform less well than older candidates in both primaries and general elections. These results suggest that youth are disadvantaged because the two main parties do not nominate enough younger adults as candidates for winnable and safe seats. Young adults also seem to be disadvantaged indirectly at the electoral stage because they lack electoral capital (experience in running for and holding office) and tend to suffer strongly from the incumbency advantage of their opponents. We infer from these findings that barring reforms to rules governing minimum candidate ages and term limits, the under-representation of youth in U.S. national-level politics will continue for the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyse how the presence of an incumbent among candidates at an election affects electoral turnout. We use a rich data set which provides information on the results of Italian municipal elections over the period 1993–2011. We find that the impact of incumbency is heterogeneous across geographical areas: incumbency produces a positive effect on turnout in the South of Italy, whereas we find a negative and statistically significant effect in the North. We speculate that the north-south divergence is related to differences in social capital and in clientelistic relationships established by incumbent politicians. Our conjecture finds support when we look separately at municipalities in the lower and upper quartile of the social capital distribution and at municipalities with high or low densities of organised crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Latin America, corruption often fails to turn voters against incumbents at the ballot box. We build on existing studies asking why and argue that voters are more likely not to reelect an incumbent with poor corruption performance when they have an ideologically viable opposition alternative. We test this with AmericasBarometer survey data for eighteen Latin American countries from 2008 to 2014. We find that respondents who are ideologically close to the incumbent are more likely to intend to vote against corruption when they are ideologically proximate to an opposition alternative. We corroborate these findings and demonstrate causality in the relationship with a survey experiment in Mexico. We conclude that the existence of an ideologically viable alternative increases voters' probability of voting against incumbents perceived to be involved in corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial and valence models are the workhorses of research on electoral behaviour. Yet, little is known about the common factors that influence the strength of both these determinants of the vote. I argue that the political context affects the prevalence of spatial and valence considerations in voters' minds. I investigate this by combining all the available data of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) with information on the political context. The results of models based on more than 160 elections in 56 countries show that ideological considerations are more important for the vote when all party leaders are disliked, incumbent coalitions are large, and polarisation is high. Valence evaluations are more important when all parties are ideologically distant from the voter, there are few parties to evaluate, and polarisation is low. These results indicate that the political context needs to be taken into account when interpreting voters' electoral signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent experimental scholarship shows that local "place identity" continues to matter to voters' assessments of candidates, echoing early findings by Key (1949) and others demonstrating electoral boosts in candidates' home areas. But it is yet to reexamine these "friends-and-neighbors" effects in the observational context, nor does it parse differences between effects of local candidate roots and current candidate residency. This paper closes these gaps using an original county-level dataset of incumbent reelection races for the U.S. Senate from 1968 to 2018 (N = ∼34,000 county-years). I show that the friends-and-neighbors effect is more nuanced than previously thought, applying to candidate roots like birthplace and local educational attainment, in addition to current residency; that these effects are in some cases heterogeneous; and perhaps most surprisingly, that local candidate effects are as strong in the U.S. Senate today as in earlier decades of "low partisanship" like the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a growing literature explores the danger that authoritarian military legacies pose for regime break-down, there is little research on the effects of similar legacies in the context of multiparty politics. This is an important gap in the literature since in many cases the introduction of formal democratic institutions has led to neither democratic consolidation nor regime breakdown. We start exploring this lacuna by developing a theory that links the use of violent electoral tactics to the ties of the executive with the authoritarian era's military. We argue that incumbents with close ties to the authoritarian regime's military are more likely to instigate election violence. Empirical tests on a sample of 230 elections in 39 African countries since 1974 show that election violence is more prevalent in countries where such ties exist. These findings speak to several areas of study, including those on election violence, and on military legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are right-wing incumbents punished for failures in public security? Partisan accountability models predict greater sanctions for politicians who fail to deliver on issues they "own." According to this logic, right-wing incumbents should suffer more from crime spikes. Contrary to this expectation, we show that right-wing governments are not always punished for sudden increases in crime just before an election. We take advantage of rich local crime data in Chile and Mexico to identify places that experienced a crime shock, and use a difference-in-differences design to illustrate the heterogeneous electoral effects of public security failures. We also provide survey evidence from 18 Latin American countries to improve the external validity of the main findings. We hold that right-wing incumbents' greater electoral resilience to crime spikes could be explained by voters attributing security failures to exogenous factors or by voters still perceiving left-wing and centrist challengers as less competent at addressing crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central tenet of democratic theory is that the threat of electoral sanction holds politicians accountable to citizen preferences. But do voters who receive social service investments evaluate the state more positively and does this translate into electoral rewards for incumbents? I examine this question in decentralized Senegal, where locally elected governments are responsible for providing basic social services. Pairing village-level data on local service delivery with local electoral results and public opinion surveys, I present evidence that receiving new public goods investments does improve citizen evaluations of their local governments, but that voters are more likely to reward incumbent mayors than they are incumbent parties. I argue that this is a rational strategy for voters in new democracies with weak party institutionalization and suggests that party systems are an important scope condition for how voters try to hold their governments accountable in emerging democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incumbent U.S. presidential candidates have been overwhelmingly successful over the past 150 years. Attempts to explain this success rate have examined both structural advantages enjoyed by incumbents and differences in rhetorical and linguistic style in campaigning, although it is less clear why incumbency conveys an advantage here. This article finds that the language used by U.S. presidential candidates over the past twenty years has an underlying structure associated with electoral success: 1. speech patterns of incumbents differ notably from those they used in their first-term campaign; and 2. speech patterns of winners are different from those of losers. Both differences are consistent, and can therefore be postulated to indicate strength of influence. The resulting inductive model of influential language is characterized by: increased positivity, complete absence of negativity, increased abstraction, and lack of reference to the opposing candidate(s). The greatest intensity of model language is used by incumbents in their second campaign and the least by losers in a first-cycle open campaign. Language improvement by incumbents occurs rapidly, suggesting that it is the result of changing self-perception rather than a conventional learning process. This finding has broader implications, suggesting that both success, and the presence of competing groups trying to make similar arguments, improve the quality of the influencing language used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the existing literature has identified a sizable incumbency advantage in single-member district (SMD) races in developed democracies, we argue that some political and institutional contexts of Japan's Lower House elections would undermine the incumbency advantage. Our regression discontinuity (RD) analysis indeed shows little advantage, and further examination suggests this as largely due to the “best-loser” provision in Japan's mixed-member system, which gives a loser of SMD competition a chance to be a “resurrected” incumbent. We also show no evidence of sorting – i.e., systematic difference between bare winners and bare losers – in close SMD races and thus add further evidence to support the methodological argument that the election RD analysis is a viable and promising research design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties enjoy an advantage to incumbency in multi-member districts? In this paper we answer this question by adapting a regression-discontinuity design to multi-member districts in congressional elections in Chile. The electoral system in place generates discontinuities in the number of elected representatives from each coalition at the 1/3 and 2/3 thresholds of the two-party vote share. Regression-discontinuity estimates indicate that, by holding two seats as opposed to holding only one, the left-leaning coalition obtains an extra 4.5% vote share in the next election and increases by 28 percentage points the probability of electing two candidates again. These results are in line with those obtained in previous studies in the U.S. but contrast with results obtained in developing countries which find a negative advantage to incumbency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a votes-to-seats nowcast model using individual level data from the British Election Study Internet panel to model the flow of the vote between 2010 and 2015. Transition matrices for each constituency are calculated using multinomial models of flows between 2010 origins and 2015 destinations. Respondents are reweighted to the polling average for England, Scotland and Wales and are further reweighted using predicted turnout to downweight respondents who are less likely to vote. The forecast performed poorly in 2015 because of polling errors and because the "Ashcroft" constituency vote intention question overestimated the Liberal Democrat incumbency effect. Without these errors, the forecast would have come much closer to the result but would still have underestimated the Conservatives' seats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature largely neglects whether individual politicians or political parties in proportional representation enjoy a similar incumbency advantage to the established democracies with SMD. We suggest that institutional settings provide incentives for political parties to field incumbent candidates strategically, depending on district size; and high levels of party system instability in consolidating democracies create conditions under which political parties benefit more from the incumbents' reputations. By using a new dataset, we test whether the incumbency advantage exists, and depends on the district size and the level of political instability in Turkey. Our results indicate that the incumbency advantage in Turkey is largely conditional on the district size. The effect of the party system instability is also substantial. The higher the party system instability, the more political parties benefit from fielding incumbents in party lists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2014 Florida gubernatorial election pitted a highly unpopular incumbent Republican against a former Republican governor since turned independent to Democratic challenger. For the duration of his first term in office, Governor Rick Scott was plagued by low approval ratings generated directly from a series of decisions that proved unpopular to most Florida voters. Fortunately for Scott, however, his opponent for reelection was none other than Charlie Crist, his predecessor in Tallahassee who chose to vacate the governorship in 2010 in a failed bid for the U.S. Senate in which he shed his Republican affiliation only to lose to Republican Marco Rubio. Since then, Crist switched from no party affiliation to the Democratic Party and then launched a spirited bid to win back his old job from Governor Scott. In this study, we use survey data supplemented by other popular accounts to demonstrate that the 2014 Florida gubernatorial election was a classic case of voters perceiving their choice as the lesser of two evils. And in this case, the low approval rating of Governor Scott was less damaging than Crist's party switch, an action that proved electorally fatal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public's anti-incumbent mood was at a then all-time high in the 2010 election with almost two-thirds (65 percent) agreeing that most members of Congress did not deserve re-election. Previous studies have not directly examined whether and how different types of media influence anti-incumbent attitudes. This study relies on a 2010 state poll to examine how partisan and mainstream news sources influence anti-incumbent attitudes, controlling for political and demographic variables, and how polarization mediates such effects. Using a structural equation model, this study finds that whereas reliance on partisan media is positively associated with anti-incumbent attitudes toward most Senators and representatives, reliance on mainstream media is negatively associated with it. On the other hand, reliance on neither media type is statistically associated with anti-incumbent attitudes toward one's own representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about comparative voting behaviour in referendums on the EU and explores variation within one country rather than variations across countries. This enables us to control for broad national context while allowing variations in the immediate referendum context, in terms of campaign intensity and incumbency. It analyses voting behaviour in the many referendums that have taken place in Ireland. The major part of the analysis deals with the five referendums since 2001, as this allows the use of the same measurement of EU support and the use of post referendum surveys. Most attention is paid to attitude to the EU, party support and satisfaction with the incumbent government, reflecting the main debates in the literature on the issues and party cues. The relative importance of each is said to depend on contextual factors such as campaign intensity and economic strength. We find both party cues and issues matter consistently, and suggestive evidence that incumbency matters to the effectiveness of cues given by the two main pro-EU parties but the major finding is that variations in the factors driving voting behaviour in different Irish polls on Europe are slight and barely significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite strong theoretical claims that politicians should target distributive benefits to swing voters and competitive districts, the empirical evidence is mixed. This paper resolves the inconsistencies by focusing on the time-varying incentives of an incumbent government. To the extent that election-motivated behavior entails directing government resources to marginal voters and constituencies, this behavior can be expected to peak in the period just prior to an election. An analysis of subsidy allocation in South Korea provides evidentiary support for this claim. In general, more subsidies are allotted to incumbents' core municipalities; however, before legislative elections, municipalities with close legislative races receive greater share of subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many theories of democracy point out that voters make their choices based on two goals: the retrospective assessment of incumbents and the prospective choice between incumbents and challengers. Do voters react to malfeasance on the part of their elected representatives? If they abandon corrupt incumbents, are they able to select more virtuous replacements? In this paper, we assess the effects of corruption on voter loyalty and, conversely, of voter defection on subsequent malfeasance. We examine these relationships with data drawn from 169 elections across 72 countries. Our results show that malfeasance does indeed provoke voter defection, but that electoral volatility is not followed by lower levels of perceived corruption. We conclude by discussing the appropriate interpretation of our results, the future research they suggest, and their meaning for related, emerging literatures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Considerable empirical evidence demonstrates presidential coattail effects in elections held in the US. Employing hybrid logit and mixed logit models that analyze data collected from voters and candidates in Taiwan, this study examines coattail effects in a non-American setting. The findings show that presidential coattails exert powerful influences on Taiwanese citizens' vote choices and take the form of conversion. Contrary to American experiences, the mediating role of incumbency is quite minimal. Presidential coattails thus provide the president with an important source of influence in the legislative body. The linkage between presidential and legislative politics through coattails can help the operation of Taiwan's democratic institutions. Future research on voting behavior needs to consider voter characteristics as well as candidate attributes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Hypothetically, in the open list PR system, all contestants, independently of their ballot position, have the same chance of winning a mandate. In practice, candidates placed at the top of the ballot enjoy a large surplus of votes. Their success can be explained by the primacy effect, in which the first ballot position acts as a focal point. The analysis of 6187 candidates running for the Polish Sejm in 2007 finds not only significant gains for top candidates, but that proximity to the upper end of the ballot likewise matters. It correspondingly discovers a weak benefit for candidates placed last on the list. Other sources of candidate advantage such as incumbency, capital city effect, age and gender are also investigated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper seeks to understand the effect of campaign finance laws on electoral outcomes. Spurred by the recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which eliminated bans on corporate and union political spending, the study focuses on whether such bans generate electoral outcomes that are notably different from an electoral system that lacks such bans. We look to two key electoral dynamics that such bans might influence: the partisan balance of power and the success of incumbents. Using historical data on regulations in 49 American states between 1968 and 2009 we test alternative models for evaluating the impact of corporate spending bans put in place during this period. The results indicate that spending bans appear to have limited effects on election outcomes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Are campaigns epiphenomena? The dominant answer in the US literature seems to be Yes. Outcomes are driven by 'fundamental' considerations in place before the campaign begins, such that dynamics within the campaign reflect the elimination of 'accidental' considerations. Multi-country comparisons, where they exist, tend to be fragmentary. Where they are not fragmentary, they are taken from so high an altitude that critical interpretive details are lost. Also fragmentary, surprisingly, is documentation of the US case itself. This paper identifies two overlapping but distinct claims: about frontrunners and about incumbents. We also identify an insufficiently recognized fact, that the very idea of a 'fundamental' is contested, and that this broadens the scope for potential within-campaign dynamics. We employ rolling cross-section survey data from the US, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This note adapts two models commonly used to estimate the incumbency advantage that US members of Congress enjoy – the ‘slurge’ and the Gelman-King Index – to provide comparable estimates for UK MPs. The results show that Liberal Democrats enjoy extremely large such advantages on a par with those of US Congressmen of between 5% and 15% of the vote. Labour and the Conservatives have incumbency advantages at around 2% and 1% respectively. The note estimates that effects could have changed the outcome in as many as 25 seats in some elections, and that they cost the Conservatives the chance to govern alone after the 2010 election. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Drawing on the concept of habitual voting (Plutzer, 2002), Franklin (2004) argues that the effects of electoral context on voter turnout will be largely limited to the cohorts who have experienced few elections in their lifetime. Those with more electoral experience would thus remain unaffected. Testing the above hypothesis is a way of a feasible indirect examination of the concept of habitual voting. Such tests have so far focused primarily on the impact of electoral competitiveness on turnout. I propose a new superior analysis of Franklin''s hypothesis that, I claim, approaches the standards of a natural experiment. My test – focusing on the national election cycles as a contextual trait of the European Parliament elections – delivers new evidence supporting this hypothesis. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Between the 1999 and 2009 elections the proportion of national female legislators in Indonesia, the world''s largest Muslim majority democracy, more than doubled. While this substantial increase may partly be explained by the recent imposition of a gender quota and placement mandate that have forced parties to increase the number of female candidates, quotas cannot fully explain the strong performance of women in the 2009 elections. First, many parties placed women higher on their lists than the laws required; second, voters appeared to over vote for women in some districts. Although incumbency''s typical effect is to inhibit female electoral success by advantaging traditional (male) competitors, I argue that women benefited largely from an alternative effect: female incumbency can improve female candidate placement and electability by demonstrating female capacity and capability. Female newcomers benefited strongly from the presence of female incumbents in their own and bordering districts, thus suggesting a positive diffusion effect of female incumbency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article tests the economic voting hypothesis in Portugal during the three most recent first-order elections (2002, 2005, 2009), trying to make sense of the multiplicity of choices in the Portuguese party system. We observed that positive sociotropic perceptions increase the probability to vote for the incumbent, even when we control for long-term factors of vote choice; egotropic effects are weaker. Negative economic perceptions not only lead to a higher probability to vote for the major opposition party, but, in some cases, increase the probabilities to vote for small parties or to refrain from voting. Sociotropic effects are actually quite constant in this timeframe, but their strength to explain the vote is lower than that of ideology and (before 2009) religiosity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Having joined the Eurozone in 2001, Greece experienced a short period of economic euphoria before confronting a major financial crisis some nine years later. In the period between joining the Eurozone and accepting the joint IMF/EU bailout package, the economic situation facing Greek voters changed dramatically. I use this setting to test the economic voting hypothesis. Using longitudinal aggregate data from 1981 to 2009, I investigate the relationship between macroeconomic indicators and vote share of the incumbent party to test the “grievance asymmetry” hypothesis. Moreover, by using individual-level data from 2004 to 2009, I investigate the extent to which retrospective sociotropic evaluations about the state of the economy are associated with support for the incumbent party. The results suggest that sociotropic economic evaluations are associated with government party support, but in a period when the economy is at its worst the incumbent has no real chance of winning and should expect support only from its long-time loyal supporters. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Comparative studies of preferential electoral systems have paid much attention to the incentives for personalized instead of party-centered campaigns, but they have largely ignored how some of these systems allow “allocation errors” and so create incentives for parties to “manage” the vote and intraparty campaigns. We discuss how the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) and single transferable vote (STV) systems create these incentives, and we illustrate the degree to which they affect actual electoral results across seven preferential electoral systems. The analysis reveals statistically significant differences in the vote inequality among incumbent cohorts (members of the same party and district), indicating the strong influence of vote division incentives over candidate-centered electoral environments. The results also have important implications for comparative research on legislative turnover and the incumbency advantage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper re-examines the electoral effect of the 11-M terrorist attacks in Madrid. Previous research has focused on post-electoral surveys to construct counterfactuals for the evaluation of the electoral impact of the attack. Bali (Electoral Studies, 2007) claims that the terrorists attacks had an important electoral impact while claim the opposite. In this paper I propose to re-examine the evidence using a methodological approach based on actual votes instead of opinions revealed by surveys, and the difference-in-differences estimator. The calculations under the counterfactual of “no terrorist attack” support the forecasts of the polls taken prior to the terrorist attack and the results of . The incumbent (conservative) party would have won the election with between 42% and the 45% of the votes, while the socialist party would have obtained 37% of the votes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Students of economic voting have recently made substantial progress in their understanding of when the economy is and is not likely to impact election outcomes. Our knowledge of the lower level dynamics that drive these aggregate results remains fairly murky. In this paper we test competing theoretical claims about how individual level orientations toward political economy lead to observed aggregate trends in support for incumbent politicians. We do this with models of support for the Labour Party in the United Kingdom before and during the recent global economic turndown. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]