One Good Term Deserves Another: The Advantage of Incumbency in Congressional Elections

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that the electoral advantage of incumbency in House elections increased during the mid-1960s. This paper examines two major hypotheses offered to explain this increase. One hypothesis holds that incumbents used their control over redistricting to create safe seats for themselves. Specific examples of this can be found, but no evidence suggests that incumbents generally took advantage of redistricting to boost themselves out of the marginal range. An alternative hypothesis attributes the increased incumbency advantage to changes in mass electoral behavior. In particular, some authors have speculated that the decline of partisanship may have benefited incumbents. With data drawn from Survey Research Center election studies this paper shows that the decline of partisanship has in fact created new patterns of electoral behavior favoring incumbents. The paper concludes by presenting some data on politically exploitable resources available to incumbents. Although the expanding perquisite base has obviously been used for political purposes, this activity has left no clear traces. Incumbents are not more widely recognized now than they were decades ago. They may be more popular now, but we have no data to settle this question one way or the other. For Republican strategists surveying the carnage that littered the 1974 congressional battlefield, there was perhaps one note of solace. Seventy-five first-term Democrats had been swept into the House. The vast majority would presumably choose to run again two years later, many of them from districts traditionally considered Republican. Only the most ardent Republican boosters thought that their party could make good on its bicentennial pledge to gain 76 in '76 and thus control the House for the first time in twenty years, but many thought the GOP could make substantial inroads into the Democratic majority. With this goal in mind the Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee sought out good challengers and helped these candidates raise substantial campaign war chests. The result of all this effort was naturally rather disappointing. Few of the