Abstract
The concept of incumbency advantage has, for more than 40 years, been a frequently discussed topic in American political science. The fact that incumbents, for various reasons, have a noticeable advantage over their challengers also brings new questions, notably what the sources of this advantage are and how exactly this advantage is reflected in the elections. Our aim was to apply the concept of incumbency advantage to the Czech political environment, specifically the Senate elections. Our research faced several challenges stemming mainly from fundamental differences between the political systems of the United States and the Czech Republic. We had to adjust the existing theoretical knowledge and measuring instruments in order to perform an analysis of the Czech Senate elections from 1998 to 2012 and answer the main research question of whether there is or not an advantage for incumbent senators in the Czech Republic. On the basis of the analysis of data from the election results, this could not be confirmed. To the contrary, in many cases, the very fact that a particular politician defends a mandate may in fact be a disadvantage. Such a claim is also in line with several other studies with a similar theme and we hope our paper will be an impulse for further research on the topic of incumbency advantage in the Czech Republic.
Highlights
The concept of incumbency advantage has, for more than 40 years, been a frequently discussed topic in American political science
Stokes and Miller 1962, Cummings 1966, Erikson 1971) noticed that there is a certain advantage possessed by incumbent politicians compared to their challengers in elections to both houses of the U
The most frequent explanation of incumbency advantage (IA) is based on the higher quality of defenders than challengers
Summary
Individuální charakteristiky kandidátů mohou sloužit voličům jako zkratky a jako volební zdroje. Pokusů přenést koncept výhody obhájce a jeho operacionalizaci na další země, které se více či méně přibližují fungování amerického stranicko-politického systému, však není mnoho. Jak popíšeme dále, koncept výhody obhájce spojen v naší práci spíše s osobnostmi (Fowler a Hall 2012), a tím pádem zejména většinovými volebními systémy, připadá v úvahu pro ČR pouze aplikace na volby senátní z důvodu pojetí konceptu jako výhody pro konkrétního kandidáta, který obhajuje mandát (ne stranické výhody, viz níže). Že tento text představuje první z návrhů k diskuzi o operacionalizaci IA pro specifika českých senátních voleb s užitím zavedených měření i s návrhem nového hodnocení postavení držitelů úřadu, přičemž se ptáme na otázku, zda v českých senátních volbách existuje výhoda obhájce mandátu a jaká je příčina této (ne)existence?
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