Bringing the incumbency advantage into question for proportional representation

Abstract

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