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This article shows that larger legislatures reduce the electoral power of incumbent parties in the executive. The electoral effects of legislature size have been largely overlooked by a literature that emphasizes its impact on policies. I estimate the effects of municipal council size on the performance of the local incumbent party in gubernatorial, presidential, and mayoral races in Brazil. The regression discontinuity design exploits variation from a law that set nonlinear council size caps after 2012. In a nutshell, every additional seat triggers a 5 percentage point vote loss for the candidates backed by the mayor's party. Additional evidence suggests that these losses are a consequence of a breakdown in the political brokerage relationships that often characterize developing democracies: in Brazil, mayors exchange patronage for the councilors' electoral support. Larger councils raise this transaction cost for mayors, more so when the council and mayor have unaligned electoral incentives at the state/national levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the conditions under which major infrastructural investments generate electoral returns. It addresses when and how the constraints imposed by myopic voters under democracy can be overcome. We argue that sustained policy spillovers are critical to broadening the pool of beneficiaries and yielding significant returns to the incumbent in the medium to long run. We make this case by analyzing Luz para Todos (LPT)—a large-scale rural electrification scheme implemented in Brazil by the Workers' Party (PT). Leveraging the LPT's quasi-experimental allocation, we document its positive and persistent impact on the PT's vote support several years after the program started running. We then illustrate the mechanism of policy spillovers by showing the impact of the LPT on the provision of education in targeted areas. Our findings suggest that infrastructure policies are more likely to generate electoral returns when the policy provision entails spillover effects through other policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canonical models of interbranch relations assume that incumbents undermine well-respected courts at their own peril. Although court-curbing proposals are frequent in diverse political and institutional contexts, there have been few efforts to examine the electoral costs of interbranch aggression. Drawing upon vignette and conjoint experiments, we find some evidence that the public will punish incumbents for attacks on courts. However, the size of the effect varies: it is largest among individuals who hold the court in high esteem and can be mitigated by copartisanship with the proposer. Moreover, once information about partisanship and issue positions is available to respondents, the effect of supporting court curbing is smaller than other considerations. These results have implications for the public's willingness to safeguard the institutional separation of powers via the electoral connection and suggest that politicians may engage in activities that erode democracy without a broad loss of public support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If a transfers policy is programmatic (it is transparent and nonmanipulable), is it irrelevant for politicians' electoral fortunes? I show that the answer is negative using a political agency model with symmetric uncertainty. In my setup, an incumbent can allocate a budget to public goods and transfers. While the payoffs from transfers tend to be permanent, the payoffs from public good provision tend to depend on the incumbent's competence. When the incumbent increases the budget to public goods, two effects arise: his performance in office today reveals more information about his identity (an informativeness effect) and voters' anticipation of narrow transfers tomorrow increases the salience of political selection (a stakes effect). I show how the incumbent strategically takes into account these two effects in view of maximizing his electoral fortunes and detail how these theoretical findings can inform empirical analyses of the electoral consequences of programmatic transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop a Downsian model of electoral competition in which candidates with policy and office motivations use platforms and campaign spending to gain the median voter's support. The unique equilibrium involves randomizing over platforms and spending and exhibits the following properties: (i) ex ante uncertainty about the winner, (ii) platform divergence, (iii) inefficiency in spending and outcomes, (iv) polarization, and (v) voter extremism. I show that platform polarization and spending move in tandem, since spending is used by candidates to gain support for extreme platforms. Factors that contribute to both include the candidates' desire for extreme policies and their capability at translating spending into support for them. I also show that strong incumbents parlay an advantage into more extreme platforms, consistent with the classic marginality hypothesis but contrasting with a large theoretical literature in which candidates with an (exogenous or endogenous) valence advantage tend to moderate their platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How well do voters hold politicians accountable? Although a long-standing research tradition claims that elections are effective tools for the sanctioning and selection of leaders, a more recent literature argues that voters often reward and punish incumbents for "irrelevant events." The empirical literature on this topic is characterized by conflicting findings. Drawing on ideas from the open science movement, and showing how they can advance the transparency of observational research, we replicated three prominent studies on irrelevant events and voting behavior: (1) Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels's 2016 study of droughts and floods; (2) Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo's 2010 study of college football; and (3) Andrew Healy and Neil Malhotra's 2010 study of tornadoes. Each study replicates well in some areas and poorly in others. Had we sought to debunk any of the three with ex post specification searches, we could have done so. However, our approach required us to see the full, complicated picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do civilians falsify their loyalties in civil wars? Government and rebel forces often seek popular collaboration for their wartime efforts, but civilian victimization encourages dissimulation as people seek safety when everyone's loyalties are suspect. This article uses a list experiment embedded in two surveys of displaced Syrians in Lebanon, to examine popular support for the two most brutal belligerents in the Syrian civil war: the incumbent regime and jihadi rebels. These data reveal systematic dissimulation across the political spectrum as different constituencies misrepresent themselves in different ways. The list experiment demonstrates large overstatements of support for the incumbent and smaller understatements of support for the jihadis, with misrepresentation concentrating among self-declared government and rebel sympathizers, respectively. It also reveals that jihadi support is so sensitive that it breaks the list experiment among nonrebels, whose nonsense answers indicate the desire to avoid suspicion of harboring extremist sympathies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As local conditions come to reflect extralocal forces, signals of government competence grow more obscure. Yet we know relatively little about how voters evaluate incumbent performance in the context of interdependence. We use a series of simulated voting tasks to examine three theoretical possibilities: blind retrospection, rational discounting, and benchmarking. Across five experiments requiring "voters" to judge performance in a setting that obscures incumbent competence, we find consistent evidence of benchmarking—subjects rewarded incumbents, capable or otherwise, who outperformed a peer. Benchmarking was evident in information processing, information seeking, and both hard and easy tasks. The disposition to benchmark was also generally robust to the availability of information that clarified incumbent competence. Our findings advance the study of performance voting, especially its underlying mechanisms, and raise questions about the availability of performance information across domains of government action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that a country's institutional features can weaken economic voting because voters find it hard to attribute performance to specific parties. We argue that local-level party system institutionalization similarly moderates the link between the economy and vote choice. We focus on one manifestation of party system institutionalization: the strength of party-candidate linkages in elections, operationalized by manually tracing the rerunning patterns of some 80,000 candidates in Indian state elections between 1986 and 2007. Using rerunning patterns to measure party-candidate linkages and rainfall data to measure the state of the economy, we show that voters were more likely to reward incumbent parties for economic performance when parties and candidates were aligned in consecutive elections. We address concerns of endogeneity in rerunning patterns, by showing that the results are robust to alternate measures of local-level party system institutionalization. They are also robust to alternative measures of the state of the economy and to using individual-level survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study whether ruling parties can systematically win a slender majority of seats in close legislative elections, a phenomenon called "precise control." We test for discontinuities in two outcomes that, in the absence of precise control, should be smooth at the 50% cutoff: the probability density of the share of seats won and the identity of the party that previously held a majority. We find robust evidence of precise control, but only in high-stakes state elections that determine which party controls congressional redistricting. Its absence in other elections suggests precise control is a strategic option used at the ruling party's discretion. It shifts its strategy in high-stakes elections from seat maximization to majority seeking, winning fewer seats but raising the chance it retains its majority. These tactics are disproportionately effective for the party defending a majority. It is four times more likely to win than to lose a close election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I consider a model of political agency in which an incumbent politician makes two decisions in sequence, having private information about the correct decision in each period. I find that policy reversals signal that a politician is incompetent. This suggests that the stigma associated with flip-flopping can be rationalized as a simple heuristic to select competent politicians. Furthermore, the negative impact of policy reversals on reputation gives the incumbent politician an incentive to disregard new information and stick to his initial policy. When reputation concerns are sufficiently strong, these incentives inhibit policy responsiveness, resulting in an inefficient degree of policy persistence. Term-limited politicians, or politicians with particularly safe (or compromised) election prospects, are more likely to reverse decisions. Relatedly, politicians are only willing to reverse decisions after a sufficient amount of time has passed or when there is sufficient evidence that the state of the world might have changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do democratic transitions affect trade policy? A well-known finding is that transitions in developing countries produce lower tariff rates. But prior work implicitly assumes that all forms of democratic transitions are alike. There is less reason to expect trade liberalization to follow transitions led by political elites, which constitute roughly half of all democratic transitions in recent decades. Analysis of industry-level tariff rates indicates that elite-led transitions are not consistently followed by trade liberalization, while transitions initiated by the general public are associated with tariff rate reductions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holding politicians accountable through reelection has long been a focus of empirical research, yet results are mixed in terms of whether electoral accountability works in practice. I offer a new theory of voter behavior to explain why electoral accountability may break down. Where voters perceive a greater likelihood of malfeasance in a second term, information about good first-term performance becomes irrelevant to predicting second-term performance. Instead, voters turn to horizontal accountability institutions for assurance that reelected incumbents will perform well. I test the argument in Peru using a conjoint experiment and regression discontinuity design. I demonstrate not only a mayoral incumbency disadvantage, but also that voters prefer challengers even over high-performing incumbents. I then show that voter preferences are affected by beliefs about increasing corruption and the low likelihood of good performance being repeated and that voter trust in horizontal accountability institutions attenuates the anti-incumbency bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine the relationship between democratic viability and polarization using a model of electoral manipulation and focusing on the strategic interaction between a policy-seeking incumbent and opposition. I find that polarization has an ambiguous effect on the incumbent's use of electoral manipulation. I apply the model to several concrete political processes and show that under these additional assumptions, the relationship between manipulation and polarization is inversely U-shaped: manipulation is low at low levels of polarization, peaks when polarization is intermediate, and decreases again as polarization becomes extreme. I show that this relationship is robust to several extensions. Finally, I investigate how the presence of a common democratic safeguard—a court—affects the relationship between polarization and manipulation. I find that the court constrains manipulation only if it is ideologically aligned with the opposition and polarization is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does immigration influence local redistributive spending? This is a salient question in Europe, where local governments exercise discretion over social policy. Although prevailing accounts predict that anti-immigrant sentiment will fuel cuts in social spending, this perspective overlooks institutional variation in foreign voting rights. Building on the literature on democracy and redistribution, this article argues that an immigration-induced "race to the bottom" in local social expenditure will be conditional on the political status granted to foreign residents. Where foreign residents possess voting rights, incumbents gain incentives to leverage redistributive transfers to mobilize immigrant votes, offsetting downward pressure on social spending. To test the argument, the analysis draws on municipal-level panel data from nine European countries and implements a difference-in-differences design within two recent cases of franchise extension. The results indicate that the extension of local voting rights is sufficient to reverse downward bias in social spending within diversifying localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What leads elites to break their democratic commitments? How do the partisan loyalties and democratic values of citizens influence these choices? This article formally analyzes incumbent abuse in democracies, the most common modern initiator of democratic breakdown. If an incumbent attempts to consolidate power, the opposition can try to rally protest but can also cry wolf without incumbent abuse. In a democratic equilibrium, incumbents avoid abuse, the opposition calls for protest if and only if abuse occurs, and citizens protest in sufficient numbers to deter elites. Results show that non-winner-take-all institutions, high media accuracy, low partisanship, and citizen support for democracy typically promote democratic survival. However, under some conditions, higher democracy support can threaten democracy. Model extensions allow incumbents to pursue democratic erosion instead of full breakdown, promote "fake news," and strategically inflame partisanship. The article explores several implications for democratic survival and incumbent strategies for subverting it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing evidence suggests that pocketbook considerations influence voting behavior in the United States and other developed countries and that incumbents can use targeted government benefits to win voter support. It remains unclear whether the general relationship between government spending and incumbent support also holds for means-tested welfare programs, however. I contribute to this empirical literature by taking advantage of the decade-long rollout of the American Food Stamp Program. The staggered timing of local program implementation allows me to credibly estimate the causal effect of this new benefit on election outcomes. Overall, I find that Democrats—at the center of the program's enacting coalition—gained votes when the program was implemented locally, apparently through mobilization of new supporters rather than the conversion of political opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under what conditions does local incumbency help a party recruit new members? In this article, I use a regression discontinuity design to study the consequences of municipal incumbency for party membership recruitment in Brazil, and I find that the effect of incumbency on grassroots party building is conditional on the party's prior level of institutionalization. Municipal incumbency increased membership recruitment only among centralized and programmatic parties that already had a well-established organizational presence in the municipality, and it was ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive for weaker parties. I also find evidence that the incumbency advantage for institutionalized parties is only partly explained by patronage, and incumbency helps these parties recruit high-intensity members who seek to participate in the party and who remain affiliated with the party even when it is no longer in power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the benefits of political alignment suggests that voters who elect governing party politicians are better off than those who elect other politicians. We examine this claim with regression discontinuity designs that isolate the effect of electing a governing party politician on an important publicly provided service in Pakistan: health. Consistent with existing research, governing party constituents receive a higher quantity of services; more doctors are assigned to work in governing party areas. However, despite many more assigned doctors, there is no increase in doctor attendance. These findings contrast with the literature on political alignment by showing that alignment to the governing party affects voters' welfare ambiguously: higher potential quantity of services may come at the cost of lower quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast literature demonstrates that voters around the world who benefit from government discretionary spending increase their electoral support for the incumbent party. But, contrary to theories of political accountability, some suggest that voters also reward incumbent parties for "programmatic" spending, over which incumbents have no discretion, even when passed with support from all major parties. Why voters would attribute responsibility when none exists is unclear, as is why minority parties would support legislation that costs them votes. We study two prominent programmatic policies. For the first, we design and implement one of the largest randomized social experiments ever. For the second, we reanalyze studies that came to opposite conclusions, using a large-scale randomized experiment and a natural experiment. By improving statistical methods and correcting data errors, we show that evidence from all analyses of both policies is consistent: programmatic policies have no measurable effect on voter support for incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary determinant of minority office holding is the racial/ethnic composition of the legislative district. Using comprehensive data on the race/ethnicity of state legislative candidates in 2012 and 2014, we find that minority candidates still emerge at lower rates than whites after accounting for district composition. Leveraging information about the overlap between congressional and state legislative districts, we demonstrate that the victories of candidates of color for Congress reduce the coethnic/racial demographic thresholds associated with state legislative candidacy and that the same pattern holds for white incumbents and state legislative candidacies. Once accounting for both the race of congressional incumbents and the racial/ethnic composition of state legislative districts, white, Latino, African American, and Asian American state legislative candidates emerge at similar rates. These results suggest that perceptions of minority candidate viability play a key role in structuring contemporary disparities in who runs for office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ryan Carlin and Timothy Hellwig challenge our claim that voters misattribute responsibility for economic performance in low-savings commodity-exporting (LSCE) countries of Latin America. They argue that we overlook incumbents' capacity to choose "policy regimes" that signal to voters their level of control the economy. They also claim that LSCE membership should be allowed to vary over time and that, even then, the concept is not useful to distinguish the impact of exogenous conditions on political outcomes. This article demonstrates that several implications of Carlin and Hellwig's alternative theory are not supported by the evidence, that their measure of policy regimes is endogenous to international conditions, and that even considering variation over time, Latin American countries remain clustered into the two original categories we proposed. We finish by showing that exogenous conditions affect presidential popularity in other LSCE countries and that the deviating case of Chile only reinforces our theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature in distributive politics suggests that parties are advantaged nationally when they control office at the local level. But is this invariably true? Whatever advantage control over the local patronage machinery may offer, local governments might under some conditions tarnish their parties' labels and thus hurt up-ticket candidates. Using a regression discontinuity design in mayoral races in Brazil, exogenous variation in fiscal resources, and a survey experiment, my analysis demonstrates the critical role that party labels play in linking national and local elections. I show that the presidential tickets of parties with strong brands suffer an electoral penalty in municipalities governed by copartisans, especially when voters are dissatisfied with the local government. Loosely organized parties with weak party labels do not suffer a similar disadvantage. Hence, this study shows that for programmatic parties with strong party brands, mayors can sometimes be a burden rather than an asset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there exists a large literature characterizing the political determination of the size of the government, much less attention has been paid to the political determination of the scope of government (i.e., what activities are undertaken by public rather than private entities). While there are economic costs and benefits to privatization, there is also a political benefit to incumbents: by privatizing today, politicians transfer future revenues (when they might not be in office) to the present. This political benefit leads to overprivatization. We show that this political benefit persists even if politicians are able to borrow against public assets. We analyze the relationship between privatization and the political environment, as well as complete a normative analysis of the costs and benefits to society of allowing politicians to privatize assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most empirical work on terrorism examines terrorist groups’ actions, that is, the volume or character of attacks, while relatively little work focuses on states’ counterterrorism actions. I address this gap with a focus on the electoral and partisan motivations of democratic states’ domestic counterterrorism actions. Do electoral concerns give incumbent governments incentives to increase the level of their counterterrorism activities? I show that elections are an important determinant of governments’ actions against domestic terrorism. However, governments’ ideological orientation is essential to understanding the relationship between elections and counterterrorism. Using data from Western European democracies between 1950 and 2004, I show that as elections approach, only Right-oriented governments increase the volume of their counterterrorism activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunistic incumbent behavior to gain electoral advantage flies in the face of democratic accountability and should elicit voter disapproval. Yet incumbents routinely behave opportunistically. This observation is puzzling. We address this puzzle by offering the first systematic, individual-level analysis of voter reactions to opportunism. We combine four original surveys with embedded experiments and focus on a common form of opportunism in parliamentary systems—opportunistic election timing to favorable economic conditions. We find that opportunism negatively affects support for the incumbent because it engenders voter concern about the incumbent’s future performance and raises significant concerns about procedural fairness. However, under good economic performance, which often triggers electoral opportunism, voters are still more likely to support than oppose the incumbent despite their negative reaction to opportunism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely believed that competitive elections are required for good democratic performance. Many races, however, see little electoral competition because of asymmetries in voters’ evaluation of candidates’ quality (due, e.g., to incumbency) and party labels (due, e.g., to ideology). We study the consequences of both types of imbalance in a unified theoretical framework building on the notion that voters are rationally ignorant and need to pay costly attention to learn about candidates. Our article rationalizes key empirical regularities such as the existence of large incumbency spending and electoral advantages or the heterogeneous effect of incumbency. Further, we highlight that properly accounting for voter attention is critical to interpreting empirical estimates of key determinants of electoral success, the sources of the incumbency advantage, and the causal effect of incumbency status. We also show that, while depressing electoral competition, imbalances nonetheless improve voter welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canonical political budget cycle theories predict an increase in visible government expenditures in election years due to signaling by incumbents. We identify the presence of an alternative election-related distortion of government budgets--a drop in capital expenditures--that applies in low capacity and weak governance settings. In election years, the increase in scrutiny and distraction of politicians and bureaucrats decreases the ability of governments to facilitate complicated capital investments. We test this argument by exploiting the exogenous phasing in and timing of local direct elections in Indonesian districts and detailed data on local budget compositions to document the existence of meaningful reductions in capital expenditures in election years. This effect is mediated by the status of incumbents. While safe incumbents who are running for reelection can avoid this particular type of distortion, elections with embattled incumbents or without incumbents running for reelection exhibit much stronger effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic accountability relies on the ability of citizens to reward and punish politicians in elections. Electoral institutions, such as the timing of elections, may play a powerful role in this process. In this article, I assess how on-cycle (concurrent) and off-cycle elections affect one facet of accountability--the incumbency advantage--using data on nearly 10,000 mayoral elections in cities over the past 60 years. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find that incumbency carries a substantial advantage for individual candidates. Moreover, I find that on-cycle elections provide incumbents with a far larger advantage than off-cycle elections do. These results show that election timing has important implications for electoral politics and demonstrate one possible mechanism for the prevalence of the incumbency advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can voters make sense of economic outcomes they observe when deciding whether to reelect the incumbent? I propose a reference point theory of economic voting that emphasizes voters' need for reference points when evaluating incumbents' performance. Consideration of economic outcomes during the incumbent's term relative to recent past outcomes in the country and in a cross-national perspective provides two such reference points, enabling a better assessment of incumbent competence. Analyses of 475 elections in 62 countries over 40 years provide evidence for my theory. Incumbents who preside over relatively better (worse) economic outcomes in domestic and international contexts are rewarded (punished) at the polls, regardless of election-year performance. I also show that cross-national benchmarking is not a universal phenomenon and identify the conditions that are positively associated with the electoral salience of relative international performance. My theory and accompanying evidence highlight that economic voting is driven by incumbents' relative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies of incumbency effects continue to accumulate, but progress in explaining these findings is modest. I introduce a simple framework that clarifies how differences in candidate characteristics (i.e., quality) could account for empirical findings of incumbency effects based on regression discontinuity designs (RDD). The key observation is that although RDD ensures that marginal winners and losers of close elections are comparable, the candidates who compete in the next election may differ for many reasons, of which "scare-off" (the tendency of incumbents to deter strong challengers) is just one. Using a simple model, I show that quality differences between marginal incumbent-party candidates and their opponents may persist even when incumbency is irrelevant to voters, incumbent retirement is random, and all new candidates are drawn fromthe same candidate pool. I conclude by showing how quality differences can help explain puzzling findings in prior empirical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of how politicians allocate their time across issues. When voters are uncertain about an incumbent's preferences, there is a pervasive incentive to "posture" by spending too much time on divisive issues (which are more informative about a politician's preferences) at the expense of time spent on common-values issues (which provide greater benefit to voters). Higher transparency over the politicians' choices can exacerbate the distortions. These theoretical results motivate an empirical study of how Members of the US Congress allocate time across issues in their floor speeches. We find that US senators spend more time on divisive issues when they are up for election, consistent with electorally induced posturing. In addition, we find that US house members spend more time on divisive issues in response to higher news transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed-member electoral systems are supposed to simultaneously produce coherent parties and ensure the representation of local interests. Whether these goals are achieved depends on the ability of parties and districts to control members of parliament (MPs). We regard the competitiveness of MPs' bids for renomination as a crucial indicator of the degree to which MPs are punished when deviating from the interests of their principals. The theoretical account we develop makes the competitiveness of MP renomination conditional on the characteristics of the electoral system, the candidate selection regime, an MP's parliamentary behavior, government status, and district characteristics. Corroborating our expectations, the analysis of the candidate selection processes in the run-up to the 2013 German Bundestag election shows that an increasing degree of ideological deviation from the party line--as expressed in parliamentary speeches--results in a worse position on the party list for opposition MPs but does not affect the renomination of list candidates from the government camp or district candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a model of electoral control with behavioral voters. The model captures two main regularities of voting behavior found in empirical studies: voters are forgetful and are influenced by extraneous events beyond the control of public officials. Specifically, we assume that voters' propensities to reelect the incumbent are governed by a stochastic reinforcement process instead of strategic reasoning. We show that even in the presence of behavioral voters, electoral control (i.e., public officials' incentive to exercise effort) can work well. More generally, the extent of control depends on the properties of the election and the electorate. A higher impact of negative events benefits electoral control, as the incumbent must exert greater effort to ensure reelection. Increasing the benefits of holding office also has a positive effect, while the degree of voter forgetfulness helps electoral control if and only if elections are held frequently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous researchers have speculated that incumbency effects are larger when voters have weaker partisan preferences, but evidence for this relationship is surprisingly weak. We offer a fresh look at the question by examining the United Kingdom's multiparty system. In general, the electoral value of incumbency should depend on the proportion of voters who are nearly indifferent between the parties competing for incumbency; in a multiparty system, that proportion may differ across constituencies depending on which parties are locally competitive. After first showing that UK voters in recent decades have stronger preferences between Conservatives and Labour than between Conservatives and Liberals, we show that incumbency effects are larger in close contests between Conservatives and Liberals than in close contests between Conservatives and Labour. By documenting how partisanship influences incumbency effects, our analysis shows that the comparative study of incumbency effects offers broader insights into electoral accountability across political systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our article investigates the role of congressional candidates during the era of party ballots in nineteenth-century congressional elections. We examine how these candidates contributed to the overall quality of the party ballot and the means by which nationalization of elections served to mitigate candidate attributes. In our analysis, we take advantage of two unique features of elections during this era. First, election timing was quite variable before 1872, as many House races were not held concurrently with presidential elections. Second, House candidates’ position on the ballot varied depending on whether a presidential or gubernatorial race was also being contested at the same time. To investigate these factors, we examine House elections prior to the adoption of the Australian ballot and find strong evidence of candidate effects during this period. Our findings raise important implications about candidate influence and electoral accountability in a more party-centered era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By conditioning their support for political incumbents on observed performance outcomes, voters can motivate elected officials to represent their interests faithfully while in office. Whether elections serve this function in subnational US government remains unclear, however, because much of the existing research on retrospective voting in these contexts focuses on outcomes that are not obviously salient to voters or over which the relevant government officials have limited influence. In this study, we examine one outcome--the quality of local roads--that is both salient and unquestionably under the control of city government. Our analysis leverages within-city variation in the number of pothole complaints in one of America's largest cities and shows that such variation can explain neighborhood-level differences in support for incumbents in two political offices--mayor and city council--across several electoral cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the effect of opportunistic election timing on the incumbent's electoral performance. While the existing literature leads to contradictory predictions about the ability of incumbent governments to benefit from strategically timed elections. We advance the theoretical debate by presenting the first cross-national comparative analysis of this question, drawing on an original data set of 318 parliamentary elections in 27 Eastern and Western European countries. In order to identify the effect of opportunistic election calling, we rely on instrumental variable regression. The results demonstrate that opportunistic election calling generates a vote share bonus for the incumbent of about 5 percentage points and is thereby likely to affect electoral accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incumbents in many developing democracies face significant disadvantages when seeking reelection, in stark contrast to the well-known incumbency advantage in the United States and other mature democracies. I propose and test a new explanation for this incumbency disadvantage: corruption. Formally, I show that incumbents become more disadvantaged as the cost of committing corruption decreases, the quality of the candidate pool deteriorates, and when gains to corruption increase with time spent in office. I test these hypotheses using innovative measures of local corruption in Romania. Identification comes from two discontinuities: (1) national rules tying mayoral salaries to population thresholds that cause jumps in the opportunity cost of corruption and thus its incidence, and (2) close elections that assign incumbency as if randomly. This strategy provides strong evidence that the large incumbency disadvantage found in Romanian local elections is caused by the incidence of corruption and the large seniority premium to corruption exploited by Romanian mayors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With little fanfare, the electoral advantage enjoyed by US representatives has fallen over the past several elections to levels not seen since the 1950s. The incumbency advantage has diminished in conjunction with an increase in party loyalty, straight-ticket voting, and president-centered electoral nationalization, products of the widening and increasingly coherent partisan divisions in the American electorate. Consequently, House incumbents now have a much harder time retaining districts that lean toward the rival party. Democrats had been the main beneficiaries of the denationalization of electoral politics that had enabled the incumbency advantage to grow, and they have thus been the main victims of the reemergence of a more party-centered electoral process. Republicans enjoy a long-standing structural advantage in the distribution of partisans across districts, so this trend has strengthened their grip on the House even as they have become less competitive in contests for the presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have shown that incumbent candidates have an electoral advantage over nonincumbents under single-member-district systems, but less is known about whether incumbents enjoy the same electoral bonus under other electoral rules. This article focuses on multimember-district systems that allow intraparty competition and contends that incumbents may have little advantage or even a disadvantage over nonincumbents of the same party under these systems, although the incentives to cultivate a personal vote-one of the main sources of incumbency advantage-are greater in these systems. I demonstrate my argument using electoral data from Japan during 1958-93 when the country used the single nontransferable vote system. Having applied an estimation of incumbency advantage immune to endogeneity bias due to strategic retirement, I find supportive evidence to my argument. The results suggest that there is an important variation in incumbency advantage across electoral systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regression discontinuity (RD) design is popular because it provides a design-based estimate of the incumbency advantage. However, the RD estimate is "local": it only identifies the effect in hypothetical elections with a 50-50 tie between the Democratic and Republican candidates. There is significant uncertainty and disagreement over the incumbency effect in safer districts away from this threshold. Indeed, mirroring the competing arguments in the theoretical literature, a survey of political scientists reveals that roughly equal numbers of respondents predict the effect to be either larger, smaller, or the same in less competitive districts. We employ a new method based on a validated conditional independence assumption that allows us to estimate the effect of incumbency in districts in a window around the threshold as large as 15 percentage points-that is, elections in which the winning candidate secured as much as 57.5% of the two-party vote. We find that the incumbency advantage is no larger or smaller in these less competitive cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is commonly argued that a presidential candidate will be helped in a state by having a governor of the same party in office. However, there is little research to support this claim. To address this question, we use a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to estimate the causal effect of gubernatorial party control. We show that a presidential candidate is in fact hurt by having a governor from the same party. On average, this penalty is a 3–4 percentage point reduction in a state’s presidential vote share in the following election. We also show that voters punish the presidential party in gubernatorial midterm elections. Having established these relationships, we explore why this is the case. The likely explanation is a variation of the ideological balancing argument, whereby voters’ choices for one office are conditional on which party holds office at a different level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That citizens engage in retrospective voting is widely established in the literature. But to what extent is retrospection affected by the expectations that leaders set in advance? We develop a theoretical framework of how expectation setting affects voters’ retrospective evaluations of incumbent performance. To test the theory, we conduct a series of between-subjects experiments in which we independently manipulate both expectation setting and the eventual outcome. In domains where politicians have practical authority, or direct influence over outcomes, setting high expectations incurs a cost in public support if the projected outcome is not attained. The same is true in domains where politicians have theoretical authority, or limited influence, but where expectation setting sends a signal about the leader’s judgment. However, in domains where politicians have neither practical nor theoretical authority, setting high expectations is unambiguously beneficial, implying that optimism is valued by voters as a personality disposition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Published scholarship argues that a poor economy depresses voter participation in the United States. This troubling result suggests that incumbents are “underpenalized” for bad economic performance. We challenge this conclusion theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, we argue that a worsening economy has a disruptive effect that prods worried citizens to voice concern and seek remedies. Empirically, we analyze county-level data and find that, contrary to earlier studies, higher unemployment rates in fact stimulate more people to vote. We show that the effect is not the result of heightened electoral competition when unemployment is high. The relationship displays a partisan asymmetry in which Republican candidates are especially harmed by higher unemployment. The results also indicate that studies of economic voting need to consider the role of turnout in connecting economic performance to the incumbent’s vote share. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of incumbency on campaign contributions in the U.S. House and state legislatures. In both settings, incumbency causes approximately a 20–25 percentage-point increase in the share of donations flowing to the incumbent’s party. The effect size does not vary with legislator experience and does not appear to depend on incumbent office-holder benefits. Instead, as we show, the effect is primarily the result of donations from access-oriented interest groups, especially donors from industries under heavy regulation and those with less ideological ties. Given the role of money in elections, the findings suggest that access-oriented interest groups are an important driver of the electoral security of incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Elites face a daunting coordination problem when contemplating a coup. Citizens, who desire political reform, face a similar coordination problem when contemplating protest. Since elites and citizens interact with the same leadership, these coordination problems are invariably linked. We develop a model which exploits this link to isolate an informational mechanism connecting popular protests and coups. Protests aggregate citizen information and provide elites with a public signal which helps them coordinate in a coup. We show that elites “overreact” to protest as a consequence of its publicity, and we provide a microfounded explanation as to why elites use protests to facilitate coordination. Our model also suggests that protests in countries with media freedom better facilitate elite coordination. To test this, we examine how media freedom affects the relationship between protests and coups. The empirical analysis shows the effect of protests on coups is exacerbated in countries where media is free. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The valence component of a party’s reputation, or brand, has been less scrutinized than other components of party-based theories of legislatures. This lack of scrutiny results from the difficulty of isolating the valence component from policy-related components and the difficulty of studying legislators’ motives. We overcome these challenges by conducting survey experiments on both voters and state legislators that show (1) that scholars have underestimated the impact of the party valence brand’s potential role in elections, (2) that legislative party leaders pressure members more on votes when the outcome affects the party valence brand, and (3) that the value of the party brand can sometimes directly affect legislators’ votes. Our results provide a rationale for why legislative leaders put so much effort into media spin battles and suggest that parties’ reputations affect legislative leaders’ ability to pass their agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Transparency has been hailed as the key to better governance, yet political actors have many reasons to resist transparency. This article studies one prominent transparency policy, Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, which have been passed by over 80 countries. By institutionalizing transparency, FOI laws increase the costs for political actors to use public office—and public information—for private gain. Why have so many states passed FOI laws despite this? I argue that, in competitive political environments, FOI laws can create benefits for political actors as well as costs. Uncertainty over future control creates incentives for incumbents to pass FOI laws in order to ensure their own future access to government information and to credibly commit to future transparency. Event-history-model results show that FOI law passage is more likely when opposition parties pose more credible challenges to incumbents and when recent turnover in executive office has been frequent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we argue that institutional changes to the seniority system have electoral consequences to incumbents. Building on the theory of Conditional Party Government, we argue that the consolidation of power in the hands of party leadership reduces the electoral value of seniority. This reduction occurs because power that was previously in the hands of committee chairs, whose roles are obtained through seniority, is ceded to party leaders. By increasing the party’s brand, this centralization also delivers a dividend received by all members regardless of seniority. We present empirical evidence supporting this argument. Our findings suggest that the “condition” of Conditional Party Government, i.e., preference homogeneity among the majority party, is only a necessary condition; in order for centralization to occur, party reformers must also overcome the opposition of entrenched senior members. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]