A Transferable Incumbency Effect in Local Elections: Why it is Important for Parties to hold the Mayoralty

Abstract

Does the outcome of the direct election of the head of the government influence the election of the legislative body? We test whether findings from research on divided government, contamination and incumbency effects observed at the national level can be transferred to the local level. In particular, we analyse quasi-presidential local government systems with a directly elected mayor. Our main hypothesis is that the party of the incumbent mayor systematically gains votes at the next council election. For our case of the German state Hesse we find a transferable incumbency effect after the introduction of the direct mayoral elections of about 3.7 percentage points. A more sophisticated model with several interaction effects specifies this incumbency effect.