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How do politicians' track records and campaign messaging interact and affect voters' welfare? We analyze this question theoretically and experimentally. In the theoretical model, which we implement in the experiment, politicians choose how much of an economy's resources to allocate to the citizenry—keeping the remainder for themselves—and then face reelection against a challenger. Both incumbents and challengers have private information about their own quality that determines the economy's level of resources. We vary whether candidates can send campaign messages and the level of variability in candidates' quality. We observe that both higher‐quality variability and allowing campaigning benefit citizens by allowing them to better select and hold accountable higher‐quality officials. Also, when incumbents have performed poorly or when quality variability is high, challengers' negative campaigning (criticizing the incumbent) increases and incumbents' positive campaigning (emphasizing their own strengths) decreases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies have documented incumbency advantage for electoral candidates. A largely unrelated strand of literature has shown that perceived competence of candidates, as inferred from their physical appearance, also predicts their electoral success. We draw upon the framework of statistical discrimination and the dual‐system theory of human cognition to understand the relationship between a political candidate's vote share, physical appearance, and incumbency status. Voters possess relatively richer information about incumbents compared to challengers. Perceived competence of candidates, as inferred from their physical appearance, is therefore expected to have a relatively weaker influence on voters' decisions to vote for incumbents. Data from Australian state elections support this prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our knowledge about how voters decide which candidate(s) to vote for under preferential-list proportional representation (PLPR) systems remains limited. In particular, it is debated whether incumbent MPs enjoy an electoral advantage over outsiders also under PLPR. We argue that such an incumbency advantage critically depends on candidate visibility (in the media) and differs across voters with varying levels of political knowledge. Our empirical analysis combines candidate information with rich individual-level voting data collected via "mock ballots" in the 2014 Belgian PartiRep election study. We show that the vote premium linked to incumbency increases with increasing media visibility, and while high-visibility incumbents outperform incumbents among the entire electorate, low-visibility incumbents enjoy an advantage only among knowledgeable voters. The results contribute to a better understanding of candidate voting and the incumbency advantage in PLPR. They also have implications for campaign strategies and the regulation of media access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature highlights the relevance of informal rules for candidate selection, empirical research has mainly focused on formal rules and procedures. This article contributes to our understanding by investigating how the informal rules employed by political parties impact on intra-party competition. Using the example of district nominations in Germany, and based on a longitudinal mixed methods design, the inductive analysis reveals five central informal rules: the Incumbency Rule, the Information Rule, the House Power Rule, Fairness Rules and Power-sharing Rules. These rules shape the expectations and behavior of those involved in candidate selection and have a significant impact on various aspects of intra-party competition. They decrease the number of aspirants, reduce intra-party conflict and emphasize the role of local party leaders in organizing and controlling intra-party competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Olaf Scholz emerged as the Federal Republic's ninth chancellor from a context marked by several "firsts," including in particular the absence of an incumbent chancellor seeking re-election and a competition between three chancellor candidates. While few, if any, individual elements of Scholz's profile were exceptional, the combination of elements was as unique as the wider political context. Echoing similar experiences from the Merkel years, the 2021 campaign and results suggest that in the German political context, advanced levels of personalization in the electoral arena are not dependent on any particular charisma of the competing lead candidates. In the end, Scholz, who managed to portray himself as a de facto incumbent seeking re-election, profited strongly from the perceived limitations and deficiencies of his contenders. A historical assessment of competitions for the chancellorship also reveals that the stakes for unsuccessful chancellor candidates have risen dramatically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Sociologia e Política is the property of Revista de Sociologia e Politica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Fact-checks have become prolific in U.S. campaigns over the last ten years. As a result, fact-checks have become one of the easiest ways for individuals to analyze the truthfulness of politicians' statements. The increase in both fact-checking and its accessibility to voters led us to ask whether fact-checks influence individuals' attitudes and evaluations of political candidates and campaign messages. To examine the impact of fact-checking, we conduct two original experiments using the 2012 Ohio Senate race between Republican challenger Josh Mandel and Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown. The first experiment utilized a sample of over 300 students during the fall of 2013. The second experiment is a crowdsourced Amazon Mechanical Turk Sample in the fall of 2014. We find the content of fact-check messages are influential in altering assessments of candidates' advertisements. We also find the source of the fact-check only modestly impacts assessments. The findings illustrate the potential power of fact-checks to influence the effectiveness of candidates' messages and reaffirm the important role the news media plays in validating candidate claims and arguments during political campaigns. [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]

Top candidates of political parties are increasingly identified as a preeminent factor in electoral campaigns and with regard to winning governmental office; yet they have always been important to a deeper understanding of party competition. This article looks into German and Austrian post-war chancellor candidates, that is, the parties' lead candidates reaching out for the top job in the executive branch. The more particular focus is on the political profiles and track records of non-incumbent candidates challenging a sitting chancellor. The study proceeds from a brief discussion of German and Austrian 'peculiarities', judged against the established parameters of Westminster-style politics, to a comparative empirical assessment. Of the four hypotheses developed (relating to constitutional features, parties and party families, opportunity structures for female candidates and 'personalisation'), only one is supported by our empirical findings. However, the notable problems of relating empirical patterns to theoretical propositions may not all be caused by political contingency. To some extent, it seems, they rather reflect the strategic choices of challenging parties specifically designed to generate the impression of 'freshness', and to take incumbents by surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider an election between two parties that nominate candidates for office. The parties are polarized along a traditional cleavage, but they are also internally divided along a second issue dimension. We introduce a threat of entry from Outsider candidates, who have the prominence and resources to bypass party elites. We consider when voters will turn to Outsiders, and identify the conditions under which Outsiders will enter the election through an established party's nomination process, as opposed to circumventing established parties via a third‐party challenge. We further explore when the elites will fail to respond to the threat of Outsider candidates. Our framework highlights how established parties will be especially vulnerable to Outsider primary entry in periods of intense ideological polarization between the parties, and that this vulnerability is especially heightened for the majority party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak‐party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic‐minded politicians who carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high‐quality potential candidates. Using congressional district‐level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered Republican potential candidates' perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their entry patterns. [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]

This article develops a novel explanation for the incumbency advantage based on incumbents' ability to signal positions that are ideologically distinct from those of their parties. Using voter-level data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and controlling for unobserved district heterogeneity, the study finds that voters in US House elections primarily use information about the ideology of candidates' parties to infer the location of challengers, while they instead rely on information about the individual candidates' ideologies to place incumbents. In higher-profile Senate elections, the difference between challengers and incumbents is trivial. Decomposing the incumbency advantage into valence and signaling components, the study finds that the signaling mechanism explains 14 per cent of the incumbency advantage in House elections, but only 5 per cent of the advantage in Senate contests. It also finds that a 50 per cent increase in party polarization increases the incumbency advantage by 3 percentage points. [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]

A handful of recent studies have investigated the causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation in candidate-centered electoral contexts. We use candidate-level data and a regression discontinuity design to estimate the incumbency advantage and its relation to dynasty formation in the party-centered, closed-list, proportional-representation setting of Norway. The results indicate that the incumbency advantage exists even in this party-centered environment; however, in contrast to recent findings for the United States and the Philippines, we find no evidence that incumbency is important to the formation of dynasties. This finding underscores the need for more research into the role of internal party organizational networks in the perpetuation of political dynasties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does sexual orientation and gender identity matter at election time? While previous literature has explored the effect of candidate gender and ethnicity on electoral results, this is the first study to quantitatively investigate the impact of sexual orientation. We build an original dataset combining individual-level data on more than 3,000 candidates in the 2015 UK election with sociodemographic indicators at the constituency level. In addition to sexual orientation and other demographic characteristics, we include candidate education, political experience, and campaign spending. We find that LGBT candidates generally do not have a negative impact on party vote share. Even in more conservative environments, LGBT candidates perform at least as well as their straight counterparts. This work is important to understand the consequences of descriptive representation and, relatedly, how rapid social change happens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most empirical studies of the effect of incumbency conclude that being a defender of the seat is an advantage and that newcomers and challengers alike have increasingly lower probabilities of winning. Yet, the majority of these studies in Eastern Europe have been based on tumultuous political environments in which electoral rules change frequently. A test of the theory of how candidate traits such as legislative and local political experience increase incumbents' electoral performance has not been done in an environment in which the electoral rules are stable. Furthermore, these studies are based in proportional representation (PR) systems, which amplify the role of the party leadership in determining candidate fate through candidate rankings. I examine Hungary's mixed-member system using candidate-level panel data that covers Hungarian national elections from 1994 to 2010, and contains basic information on all candidates running in SMDs. I find that Hungarian SMD incumbents perform worse at the elections than their challengers. However, in the long run, legislative experience in SMDs neutralizes this effect. Additionally, local politicians, such as mayors, manage to increase their vote share at national elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Trump's nomination posed a challenge for Republican congressional candidates running on the ticket with him in 2016. The nominee's intense base of support within the party combined with his unprecedented unpopularity more broadly required these candidates to think strategically about supporting or opposing him. This article examines how they responded to that challenge, what explains their different responses, and what electoral consequences ensued from their choices. The data show that candidates' positions on Trump primarily reflected the partisanship of their districts and secondarily their gender and incumbency status. Their strategic choices had little general impact in an election almost completely dominated by partisanship, but in at least a few instances refusal to support Trump may have been necessary for the Republican incumbent to win reelection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An important empirical literature evaluates whether voters are rational by examining how electoral outcomes respond to events outside the control of politicians, such as natural disasters or economic shocks. The argument is that rational voters should not base electoral decisions on such events, so evidence that these events affect electoral outcomes is evidence of voter irrationality. We show that such events can affect electoral outcomes, even if voters are rational and have instrumental preferences. The reason is that these events change voters' opportunities to learn new information about incumbents. Thus, identifying voter (ir)rationality requires more than just identifying the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral fortunes. Our analysis highlights systematic ways in which electoral fortunes are expected to change in response to events outside incumbents' control. Such results can inform empirical work attempting to identify voter (ir)rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts the second-order theory for regional elections to the test. Not by analysing voting behaviour but with the use of campaign data. The assumption that regional campaigns are overshadowed by national issues was verified by analysing the campaign tweets of Flemish politicians who ran for the regional or national parliament in the simultaneous elections of 2014. No proof was found for a hierarchy of electoral levels but politicians clearly mix up both levels in their tweets when elections coincide. The extent to which candidates mix up governmental levels can be explained by the incumbency past of the candidates, their regionalist ideology, and the political experience of the candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vote buying and patronage distribution have become widespread in Indonesian elections. Yet, it is also evident that some candidates use programmatic strategies to compete. Drawing on the case of the 2017 election in Kulon Progo district, Yogyakarta Special Region, and using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, this article seeks to explain why the incumbent opted out of vote buying and similar clientelistic strategies and why voters supported his programmatic approach. We show that the incumbent prepared vote buying as a fallback strategy but did not activate it. He was able to make this choice because he faced little competition and had invested politically in programmatic policies, though he was also assisted by his ability to manipulate his proximity with the Yogyakarta Sultanate for electoral purposes. This article shows that Indonesian voters can be highly appreciative of programmatic approaches, rather than simply being the "ballot-sellers" they are often assumed to be in the literature on money politics and patronage. In this case, moreover, programmatic success produced a less competitive election that in turn created the possibility for the incumbent candidate to opt out of clientelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines brokerage activity and "vote buying" in the 2017 Pati district election, where the incumbent seeking re-election was the only candidate on the ballot. Although running unopposed, Indonesian election laws still require unopposed candidates to win the majority of votes cast in order to win. Despite facing a weak opposition that was under-funded and largely limited to the use of social media, the unopposed incumbent in Pati nonetheless built a large and expensive campaign organization and vigorously campaigned for votes. Some of the incumbent's supporters gave money directly to voters in the days before the election. Our study finds that a complex interaction between strategic political considerations and cultural factors explains the apparent paradox of why a popular and unopposed incumbent who was virtually assured victory would engage in an active campaign similar in size and scope to one found in a regular election involving multiple candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains a new trend in Indonesian local politics: the rise of uncontested elections. We explore this trend by way of detailed examinations of two such elections in February 2017: the district head election in Pati, Central Java; and the mayoral election in fayapura, Papua. In doing so, we consider explanations that have been advanced elsewhere, including those that focus on "scare-off effects" and incumbency advantages. Though such approaches are relevant, we show that there was a contrast between our two cases: in Pad, the strength of the incumbent and his wealthy running mate dissuaded rival candidates and parties from competing: in fayapura, two other candidates wanted to run, and even secured backing from local party branches, but their candidacies were annulled after legal challenges. If the first pathway showed a process of broad-based elite bargaining producing a "win-win solution", in fayapura the pathway involved a zero-sum-game contest between rival elites. Despite these differences, in both cases there was competition between local elites, but it happened prior to the election. Overall, we argue the rise of uncontested elections points to growing elite entrenchment in local politics. [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]

Using official electoral results from provincial elections since 1973, we evaluate the incumbency effect in Quebec by measuring the impact of a combination of characteristics related to candidates and political parties. We verify whether the presence of an incumbent candidate is necessary to ensure that the incumbent party benefits from an electoral advantage. We also compare the magnitude of the incumbency effect between governing and opposition parties. Making use of parametric multivariate statistical tools, we conclude that political parties benefit from an electoral advantage in Quebec. Except for ministers who make a small difference, simple Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) do not improve their electoral performance, while in some cases new candidates with incumbent parties perform better. [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]

This paper focuses on the introduction of higher re-election bars for office-holders. In particular, we assess which re-election bars are optimal when incumbents gain socially valuable experience in office. We develop a two-period model in which the output of a public good depends on an office-holder’s effort, ability and experience. When campaigning for election to an open seat in the first period, candidates can make binding offers of the minimum share of the votes they must obtain to be re-elected in the second period, should they win in the first. We prove that, in equilibrium, both candidates offer the same vote-share threshold, that it exceeds 50%, and that it is socially optimal. The higher threshold increases the expected effort over both periods and tends to raise the expected level of ability of office-holders in the second. Together, these effects outweigh the expected loss of incumbents’ acquired experience, which results from their reduced chances of getting re-elected with the higher bar. The socially optimal vote threshold is increasing in the value of experience. All of the above conclusions would hold if the optimal threshold were set instead by law. [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]

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]

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]

Candidates’ political qualities and personal characteristics reflect what priorities political parties have when they nominate for viable seats. The limited research on the link between candidate characteristics and ranking on closed lists is an important hiatus in understanding legislative recruitment since in closed list PR nomination to top positions on viable lists virtually guarantees election. We address the issue by analyzing longitudinally the determinants of candidate list placement in Romania, an intriguing case given its low proportion of reelected incumbents and women MPs. Our findings indicate that while male candidates are placed higher up on the lists than women, the positive effect of incumbency is larger for female than male incumbents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voters prefer political candidates who are currently in office (incumbents) over new candidates (challengers). Using the premise of query theory (Johnson, Häubl & Keinan, 2007), we clarify the underlying cognitive mechanisms by asking whether memory retrieval sequences affect political decision making. Consistent with predictions, Experiment 1 (N = 256) replicated the incumbency advantage and showed that participants tended to first query information about the incumbent. Experiment 2 (N = 427) showed that experimentally manipulating participants' query order altered the strength of the incumbency advantage. Experiment 3 (N = 713) replicated Experiment 1 and, in additional experimental conditions, showed that the effects of incumbency can be overridden by more valid cues, like the candidates' ideology. Participants queried information about ideologically similar candidates earlier and also preferred these ideologically similar candidates. This is initial evidence for a cognitive, memory-retrieval process underling the incumbency advantage and political decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the personal vote to be cast in a meaningful way it is a minimal condition that voters recognise candidates. However, from earlier studies we know that there is huge variation in the number of candidates recognised. Little to nothing is known about candidate recognition and its determinants. This study explores the sources of candidate recognition from three different angles: candidates; citizens; and context. Furthermore, it enables the distinction of campaign-related from other factors. A unique multi-level within-subject design was set up for the analyses of the 2013 German Federal Election to ensure a meaningful validation of our theoretical framework. Our results suggest that, indeed, many factors lead to recognition but as well that earlier studies overestimated the effects of political interest or incumbency status. Moreover, we show that a good campaign makes a difference for recognition – as does the context in which it takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We study the role of re-election concerns in incumbent parties' incentives to shape the information that reaches voters. In a probabilistic voting model, candidates representing two groups of voters compete for office. In equilibrium, the candidate representing the majority wins with a probability that increases in the degree of political disagreement — the difference in expected payoffs from the candidates' policies. Prior to the election, the office-motivated incumbent party (IP) can influence the degree of disagreement through policy experimentation — a public signal about a payoff-relevant state. We show that if the IP supports the majority candidate, then it strategically designs this experiment to increase disagreement and, hence, the candidate's victory probability. We define conditions such that the IP chooses an upper-censoring experiment and the experiment's informativeness decreases with the majority candidate's competence. The IP uses the experiment to increase disagreement even when political disagreement is due solely to belief disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the spread of direct mayoral elections was weakened during the 2000s, they have survived in many municipalities until the present time. In the context of Russia's 'power vertical', regional authorities are strongly involved in local elections. As a rule, they have their own candidates and provide them with support during election campaigns. It is not surprising that most often the candidates of governors are incumbents. At the same time, there are many cases when a governor prefers not to support an incumbent. Based on data from Perm Krai, this article examines some competing explanations for the strategy employed by the Governor in mayoral elections. The analysis demonstrates that an incumbent's ability to provide the party of power with the best elections results is the most important factor determining the support of the governor. The second significant factor is the resources of the candidate. The policy implementation qualities of an incumbent are also taken into account but they are the least important. These results are in line with the general logic of an 'electoral authoritarian regime' that requires the building of 'electoral vertical'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incumbents significantly outperform challengers in American elections, but the implications of this phenomenon are ambiguous. Do otherwise unpopular incumbents exploit the political system to stay in power, or do open elections effectively select good candidates who will naturally win reelection? To address this question, I estimate the extent of incumbent success that can be attributed three factors -- party match, characteristic selection, and officeholder benefit. Across numerous settings in the U.S., a significant portion of incumbent success can be attributed to the tendency of previous elections to select popular candidates that match the partisan preferences of voters. On average, party match explains about five-eighths of incumbent success and characteristic selection explains one-eighth, leaving only one quarter to be explained by the effects of holding office. These results also vary in meaningful ways across time periods, settings, and electoral institutions. [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]

Copyright of Revista de Sociologia e Política is the property of Revista de Sociologia e Politica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using survey data from more than 500 legislative candidates in 17 states during the 2008 election, I examine whether state house candidates who devote more time to their campaign win a larger share of the major-party vote. Consistent with previous work studying campaign spending in state legislative elections, I find a positive and significant association between campaign time and vote percentage for challengers-but not incumbents-in incumbent-contested elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the relationship between provincial election outcomes and campaign spending. This study is novel as it utilizes only those expenses that should have a causal link with election success. OLS regression controlled for candidate quality, incumbency, and economic conditions reveals a positive (negative) relationship between campaign (challenger) spending and election succession, while logistic regression results in a 93% correct prediction rate. Two-staged least-square regression corroborates the findings. The results suggest that although campaign spending is useful, incumbency status and experience are more important. Additionally, campaign spending is less important during close elections and has a diminishing marginal return. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Models of political competition portray political candidates as seeking the support of the median voter to win elections by majority voting. In practice, political candidates seek supermajorities, rather than majorities based on support of the median voter. We study the political benefits of supermajorities using data from Bavaria, the largest German state. Members of the Bavarian parliament had been permitted to hire relatives as office employees, but in the year 2000 the practice was prohibited, with exceptions that allowed continuation of employment of previously hired relatives. The circumstances provide an informative setting to relate political behavior to protection of incumbency. Our results show that the likelihood of politicians hiring relatives increased with the margin of the majority for the incumbent in the previous election. When the majority increased by one percentage point, the likelihood of hiring relatives increased by about one percentage point. Supermajorities thus facilitated political rent extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the primaries have been popularized as the mechanism for selecting candidates more open and participatory, often generate the opposite effect, strengthening the personalization of politics and not the institutionalization of parties. We study the primaries of Chile made by the coalition of center-left (Concertation) to choose their candidates for mayor in 2012. We argue, first, forcing major electoral candidate incumbent, reduced turnout. Secondly, that the voter turnout in the general election was almost identical between communes where were and were not primary. Thirdly, that primaries improved eligibility mainly on the challengers. In consequence, the primaries did not stimulate turnout, but contributed to the success of the candidates. [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]

This article proposes a theory of racial mediation and examines how candidate race affects media coverage of political viability. Using two different types of content analysis—manual and automated—the article assesses print media coverage of white and visible minority candidates in the 2008 Canadian federal election. The study reaches two substantive conclusions. First, it appears that candidate race does not influence reporting on political viability in the aggregate, but does affect how non-incumbent candidates with racial minority backgrounds are portrayed. Although non-incumbent white candidates receive fairly positive coverage of their electoral qualifications, this is not the case for visible minority candidates. Incumbency washes away these differences, suggesting that once minority candidates have, in effect, proven themselves with an electoral win, they will receive coverage that is equivalent—and sometimes even more favourable—than their white competitors. Second, this study demonstrates how methodological choices influence the conclusions reached by content analysts. The article highlights how a researcher using an automated approach to content analysis could reach different conclusions than a researcher relying on a manual approach. The article concludes with a discussion of the trade-offs that researchers face when studying the media coverage of minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The strong support that African presidents retain among voters of their own ethnicity, despite clear evidence of shirking and corruption, has prompted numerous empirical investigations into whether an incumbent's ethnicity or performance is more important to African voters. The model of vote choice underlying almost all of these studies is additive and implies that either coethnicity or good performance can increase a candidate's vote share. However, there is little theoretical justification for such a model. In the dominant theory of ethnic voting in Africa, coethnicity is a signal of better outcomes, indicating that ethnicity and performance are not separate considerations. Using an experiment that is designed to determine how Ugandan voters make choices, the author shows that the effects of coethnicity and good performance interact: neither attribute increases support for a candidate in the absence of the other. Though previous analyses indicate that, all else being equal, voters always prefer coethnics, this study demonstrates that coethnics only have an advantage when they are not shirkers. Additionally, though previous studies indicate that voters always prefer good performers, this analysis shows that voters are indifferent to the performance of non-coethnic candidates. The article provides evidence that this pattern is in fact a result of voters' beliefs that they will only receive future goods from coethnics, making a demonstrated ability to provide such goods relevant for the electability of coethnic candidates, but not for non-coethnics. Since a large number of African voters do not share the ethnicity of their incumbent, this finding has troubling implications for accountability of African leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the extent to which electoral selection based on candidate quality alone can account for the pattern of re-election rates in the US Senate. In the absence of officeholder benefits, electoral selection is simulated using observed dropout rates from 1946 to 2010. This provides a benchmark for the re-election rate that would be generated by incumbent quality advantage alone. The simulation delivers a re-election rate that is almost identical to the observed rate prior to 1980, at around 78 per cent. In the later subsample, quality-based selection generates a re-election rate that is seven percentage points lower than observed. The divergence in the re-election rates in the later subsample is consistent with the findings of vote margin studies that indicate rising incumbency advantage due to officeholder benefits. In addition, it is found here that the quality-based selection first-term re-election rate is significantly lower than the observed first-term re-election rate. This result supports sophomore surge vote margin studies of officeholder benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extended party network (EPN) theory characterizes political parties in the United States as dynamic networks of interest groups that collaboratively support favored candidates for office. Electoral predictions derived from EPN theory have yet to be tested on a large sample of races. We operationalize EPNs in the context of organized interest contributions to U.S. House campaigns. We deduce that support by a partisan community of interests signals the ideological credibility and appeal of a candidate. EPN integration overcomes voter ambiguity surrounding challengers' ideological preferences, and resources provided by these coordinating interest groups promote a consistent message about the candidate. Using data from the 1994-2010 cycles, we apply network analysis to detect EPN support of challengers and find that EPN integration substantially improves the electoral prospects of challengers. The effect of EPN integration is distinct from that of campaign resources. The findings provide support for EPN theory, as applied to congressional elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The incumbency advantage is typically thought to constrain female political representation, but can female incumbency provide a signal to parties that reduces strategic gender bias? We argue that once women prove they can win elections, parties will revise their strategic evaluations of their value as candidates. We test this using an original dataset of twenty-one Chilean elections between 1989 and 2012. We use a Heckman selection model to assess re-election rates by incumbent candidate gender, conditional on the re-nomination of incumbents. We find that female incumbents are just as likely to be re-nominated and re-elected as their male counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]