Incumbent Candidates Research Articles

Who wins in the Indian parliament election: Criminals, wealthy and incumbents?

The study examines the impact of criminal charges, wealth, incumbency status of the candidates and the party on their chances of winning and vote share in the Indian parliamentary elections 2009 using candidate level information on 8070 contestants from 543 constituencies. The descriptive and econometric analyses of the data reveal that there is a strong association between wealth, criminal charges and incumbency status of the candidates and the electoral outcomes. Wealthy incumbent candidates had higher chances of winning the election and these candidates also seem to be facing criminal charges. The incumbent candidates belonging to the state ruling party had higher chances of winning and increasing their vote share. Though criminal charges depress the chance of winning and vote share, the incumbency effects, particularly the party incumbency, has a bigger effect than criminality and wealth status.

Electoral Budget Cycle in General and Local Elections: Supply or Demand-Driven Electoral Budget Deficits?

This paper inquires the following research question that “to what extent, do election years have explanatory power to predict central and local governmental administrative units’ budget deficits in electoral districts?” Theoretically, this research’s theoretical part utilizes the electoral budget cycle approach that government party/parties increase(s) budgetary expenditures and decrease(s) taxation before the elections for re-election prospect. This paper’s arguments are twofold. First, classic electoral budget cycle disregards temporal order in elections that between two first-order elections (general elections in parliamentary systems and presidential elections in presidential systems), there are second-order elections (local elections at the district/province/city level in parliamentary systems and legislative elections in presidential systems). Second, the classic electoral budget cycle approach deals with a monolithic conception of the incumbent party in parliamentary democracies such that there is no distinction between single party majoritarian and coalition government. Methodologically, this research employs time-series cross-section data and resorts to fixed-effects model. This paper compiles a new dataset on local government spending-revenue for all Turkish municipalities and special provincial administrations at the district level from Turkish Statistical Institute library’s scanned archive documents and on incumbent candidate and party (re-)election between 1980 and 2007 in general elections. Findings can be compartmentalized into three. Firstly, there are electoral budget cycles in both general and local elections. Secondly, government type matters in electoral budget cycles due to clarity of the fiscal responsibility. Thirdly, there are electoral credit cycles in agriculture and real estate to supplement electoral budget deficits.

Social Media in Political Marketing: A Study of TemanAhok

Deferring to McCombs and Shaw’s agenda setting theory, this research aims to study the power of social media in the political marketing of incumbent candidate Governor of DKI Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) by Teman Ahok (Ahok’s Friend). This paper tests the theory that what is considered as important by media will be perceived as important to the public as well. Teman Ahokwas established long before Ahok was nominated to run for the governorship. Teman Ahok organization employed social media as the basis to market its candidate. Social media used were Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, blog, website, and WhatsApp. Social media was considered as effective to reach the general public. Through the message delivered continuously to the public via social media, the proponents expected that the public would consider that the message delivered was important and the candidate they support would be elected during the election of DKI Jakarta’s Governor.

Les députés et les partis politiques sortants profitent-ils d'un avantage électoral ? Une analyse des résultats électoraux au Québec

AbstractUsing 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.

Perils of pluralism: Electoral violence and incumbency in sub-Saharan Africa

Why do some multiparty elections lead to political violence while others do not? Despite extensive literatures on democratization, civil war, and violence against civilians in civil war, the topic of electoral violence has received less attention. We develop a set of theoretical propositions to explain this variation, testing them on an original dataset on African elections from 1990 to 2008. We find that elections in which an incumbent presidential candidate is running for re-election are significantly more likely to experience electoral violence, both prior to the election and after voting has taken place. We argue that clientelism is behind this pattern, and that clients often resort to electoral violence to protect a reliable incumbent patron. On the other hand, when an incumbent candidate is not running for office, we argue that clients are less willing to assume the risks of participating in electoral violence because candidates in the election have not established a record of delivering patronage at the executive level. We further find some evidence that pre-existing social conflicts increase the risk of pre-election violence. We suggest that this finding is due to the tendency of political elites to mobilize voters around pre-existing political and economic grievances to promote their candidacies, in turn heightening tensions and divisions. We also examine, but find little support for, a number of other possible determinants of electoral violence, such as regime type, income level, international observers, ongoing civil war, pathway to power, and first elections after civil war. The article contributes not only to a small but growing literature on electoral violence but also to a burgeoning literature on political behavior in African elections.

INFORMATION AND THE BEAUTY PREMIUM IN POLITICAL ELECTIONS

We use data on 800 candidates from the 2012 U.S. election cycle in U.S. and state congressional races to examine the degree to which beauty affects electoral outcomes. We find that a candidate that is one standard deviation more beautiful receives a 1.1 percentage point higher vote share and is 6.0 percentage points more likely to win the election. This beauty premium is larger in situations where voters are less likely to have more information about the candidate. The beauty premium is much smaller for U.S. congressional races than for state congressional races, and is also much smaller for incumbent candidates. In addition, we find a correlation that the beauty premium is lower when a candidate spends more money on the election. (JEL D72, J70)

Modalitas Calon Bupati Dalam Pemilihan Umum Kepala Daerah Tahun 2015

In the history of political contestation in South Sulawesi as the election, there has never been a woman who has won an election. Moreover, the female candidate is a newcomer in the constituency, while his political opponents in the election are the incumbent. an incumbent is considered to have a greater opportunity than the other candidates, because it is considered to have more capital as the level of popularity and figuritas. Women in the political contest would also have the same opportunities as other candidates, although the participation of women in a political contest still an issue - an issue that marginalize women. It still can be minimized depending on how the power of modality which is owned by the candidates, in which a candidate must have akumalasi more capital so as to win a dispute. This study aimed to analyze and learn how modality which is owned by the candidates in the administration of the election, studies in Indah Putri Indriani as regent elected in the district of North Luwu, South Sulawesi Province Year 2015. The method in this research is qualitative research. The technique of collecting data through interviews and documentation. The results of this study found four dominant modality owned by Lovely Daughter Indriani compared to the incumbent candidate. The modality is social capital, cultural, political and economic. This proves that the beautiful daughter Indriani as a woman and also newcomers are able to accumulate the capital it has, so it managed to win a political contest and also became the first female Regent in South Sulawesi.

Striving for influence

I consider how asymmetric information between the party selectorate and members of Parliament affects the renomination of incumbent candidates. By applying an adverse selection model, I argue that the selectorate looks to past performance to select candidates it expects will gain influence. However, the impact of performance varies according to the need for and availability of information. The European Parliament (EP) provides a most-likely case for information asymmetry. Studying three elections in 11 member states, I find that the allocation of influential positions in office improves chances of reselection. The effect increases when the allocation is more selective, and when the prior uncertainty around candidacies is high. The study thus proposes a new approach to the relationship between national parties and transnational groups in the EP. It also suggests venues for research on parliamentary politics and candidate selection in general.

Does Candidate Sexual Orientation Matter at the Ballot Box? A Field Experiment

Surveys and laboratory experiments suggest the existence of enduring hurdles that LGBTQ candidates must overcome to win. But to what extent do actual voters respond to candidate sexual orientation? To what extent is their response conditioned by the presence or absence of social issues in the campaign dialogue? To test these questions, a field experiment was embedded in a low salience 2016 Democratic Primary race for county recorder in Franklin County, Ohio. The incumbent candidate was openly gay – he mentioned his sexual orientation in his official biography – and had campaigned for gay rights. Nonetheless, given the obscurity of the office, very few voters would be expected to know either of these things. With precincts randomly assigned to receive mailings that vary the biographical information (sexual orientation mentioned or not) and the issue context (gay rights included or not), we test for a real world effect of candidate sexuality. We find that the mere fact of being gay had no discernable effect on voters, while being gay and expressing commitment to marriage equality actually increased support for the candidate. Ultimately, the results suggest scholars may have underestimated the capacity of gay candidates to run as themselves and succeed.

Come hell or high water: An investigation of the effects of a natural disaster on a local election

How is electoral support for incumbent candidates shaped by natural disasters? Do voters in districts newly recovering from a national disaster punish or reward incumbents for their response to the disaster when compared to their counterparts in unaffected districts? The City of Calgary is used here as a case study. On 20 June 2013, the Bow and Elbow rivers flooded in the Calgary, devastating 26 neighborhoods and displacing approximately 75,000 people, or 7 per cent of the city's population. Four months later, a municipal election was held. When analyzed as a natural experiment, results suggest that support for the incumbent mayor increased city-wide between the 2010 and the 2013 elections, but at a lower rate in areas that experienced residential flooding. However, the flood did not produce equivalent treatment and control groups, as flooded areas differ systematically from areas that were not flooded in ways key to the election outcome. When analyzed more conservatively, results show that the flood had no effect on incumbent support or voter turnout. Thus, this disaster introduces a note of caution into the literature examining the effects of natural disasters on electoral behavior.

Pola Pelanggaran Pemilukada dan Perluasan Keadilan Substantif

The pattern of direct elections of regional head and the Constitutional Court practices in adjudicate disputes local elections have been developed rapidly. Some of violations color the elections of regional head. They were the mobilization and partiality of Civil Servants, abuse of office, facilities, and state budget by the incumbent candidate, and the practice of money politics. The systematic, structured as well as massive violations generally results reelected vote with a final decision or interlocutory preceded. More than that, various violations of further stages of the General Election was also assessed based on the principle of free and fair election so that the decision of the Court has eigh models based on similar characteristics.The paradigm of substantive justice made procedural rules does not open the opportunity for justice. It drives the role of the Constitutional Court put the final determinant of local democracy which is still colored by piracy and fraud. Constitutional Court justices are not only expand but also strengthen democracy that took place so as not limited to procedural democracy. With this, the examination is very extensive; the free encyclopedias assess weight and sanction violations. Paradigm has evolved to be followed by the ratio decidendi constancy previous decisions and anticipate the variety of sanctions violations by designing the right to justice itself.

Inferring Roll-Call Scores from Campaign Contributions Using Supervised Machine Learning

This paper develops a generalized supervised learning methodology for inferring roll call scores for incumbent and non-incumbent candidates from campaign contribution data. Rather than use unsupervised methods to recover the latent dimension that best explains patterns in giving, donation patterns are instead mapped onto a target measure of legislative voting behavior. Supervised learning methods applied to contribution data are shown to significantly outperform alternative measures of ideology in predicting legislative voting behavior. Fundraising prior to entering office provides a highly informative signal about future voting behavior. Impressively, contribution-based forecasts based on fundraising as a non-incumbent predict future voting behavior with the same accuracy as that achieved by in-sample forecasts based on votes casts during a legislator's first two years in Congress. The combined results demonstrate campaign contributions to be powerful predictors of roll-call measures of ideology and resolve an ongoing debate as to whether contribution records can be used to make accurate within-party comparisons.

College football, elections, and false-positive results in observational research

A recent, widely cited study [Healy AJ, Malhotra N, Mo CH (2010) Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107(29):12804-12809] finds that college football games influence voting behavior. Victories within 2 weeks of an election reportedly increase the success of the incumbent party in presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections in the home county of the team. We reassess the evidence and conclude that there is likely no such effect, despite the fact that Healy et al. followed the best practices in social science and used a credible research design. Multiple independent sources of evidence suggest that the original finding was spurious-reflecting bad luck for researchers rather than a shortcoming of American voters. We fail to estimate the same effect when we leverage situations where multiple elections with differing incumbent parties occur in the same county and year. We also find that the purported effect of college football games is stronger in counties where people are less interested in college football, just as strong when the incumbent candidate does not run for reelection, and just as strong in other parts of the state outside the home county of the team. Lastly, we detect no effect of National Football League games on elections, despite their greater popularity. We conclude with recommendations for evaluating surprising research findings and avoiding similar false-positive results.

Evaluating the Roles of Ethnicity and Performance in African Elections

While many scholars argue that ethnicity drives voting behavior in Africa, recent quantitative work finds government performance also matters. But under what conditions do Africans use ethnicity or performance to inform their vote? We argue that the importance of ethnicity and performance is conditional on whether voters evaluate co-ethnics and incumbent candidates. We hypothesize co-ethnic voters will coordinate and form blocs, whereas non-co-ethnics are more likely to divide their support between candidates. We also hypothesize that while incumbent performance matters to all voters independent of ethnicity, citizens will forgive their co-ethnic incumbent’s poor performance. Tests using data from a nationwide exit poll we conducted during Kenya’s 2007 national election strongly support our hypotheses. Our results are robust to analyses concerning the potentially confounding relationship between ethnicity and performance.

Political Influence on Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This article examines the extent to which political variables affect budget deficits, money growth and inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using the Arellano–Bond dynamic panel data analysis on 36 SSA countries from 1980 to 2010, we first characterise the impact of presidential elections on two policy variables: government budget deficits and money growth. We then examine the impact of government budget deficits and money growth on inflation, while taking account of any direct political pressure via presidential elections. Importantly, we show that country groups, based on the level of income, are important in teasing out the varying effects of budget deficits and elections, finding evidence of political budget cycles and political monetary cycles in the middle-income countries. We also characterise whether a country is part of a fixed-exchange rate regime, showing that this limits electoral pressure on the monetary policy variable. We examine the competitiveness of elections by whether they are multiparty or single-party elections and by whether there is an incumbent candidate running for re-election. When we examine the feed-on effects on inflation, there is little indication that the election pressures on either fiscal or monetary variables become inflationary. There is evidence, however, of money growth and budget deficits being directly inflationary, particularly in the low-income countries.

Cash Transfers and Mayoral Elections: The Case of Sao Paulo's Renda Mínima

Several recently published studies analyze the effects of national conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, such as the Brazilian Bolsa Familia and the Mexican Oportunidades, on presidential elections. Most of them show that these programs boost incumbents' electoral support among the poor. This research note is the first scholarly attempt to investigate this phenomenon at a lower-level unit of a federal state, by assessing the impact of a municipal cash transfer program on a mayoral election. Specifically, it investigates whether Renda Minima, the cash transfer program of the city of Sao Paulo, affected beneficiaries' electoral behavior in favor of the incumbent candidate in the 2004 mayoral election. This note analyzes survey data from CEBRAP/IBOPE and shows that cash transfers did, indeed, affect beneficiaries' behavior in the predicted direction, but only in cases where they did not benefit from any other CCT program, such as the federal Bolsa Familia or the Sao Paulo state Renda Cidada. These results suggest that the pro-incumbent effect of CCT programs may be diluted by similar programs launched by governments at other tiers of a federation, even if they are led by the same party.

Bringing the incumbency advantage into question for proportional representation

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.

Incumbency Disadvantage under Electoral Rules with Intraparty Competition: Evidence from Japan

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.

10. KEGAGALAN CALEG PETAHANA DALAM PILEG DPRD JAWA TENGAH 2014

Legislative incumbent candidates have a chance to win the legislative elections with the political capital that they have been owned. However, the fact is that 32 of the 69 legislative incumbent candidates have been failed to be re-elected in 2014 election for Central Java House of Representative. Through a qualitative approach this study explains the failure of legislative incumbent candidates in 2014 Central Java house of representative. The results show incumbent candidate reasons of failure is the failure of the party in maintaining the seat, the inability of incumbent candidates in facing internal competition with other candidates in one party, and the serial number. Pragmatism voters, election less professional organizers are all factors that contribute to the defeat of incumbent candidates.

Parlamentarni izbori u Beranskom okrugu 1920. i 1923. godine

The lack of more significant political tradition due to the fact that Berane and the area of Donji Vasojevici were liberated from the Ottoman authorities in 1912, which lasted for many centuries, as well as the fact that only three years later a two-year period of AustroHungarian occupation took place, mainly predetermined the atmosphere of political life in the first years after Yugoslav unification in 1918. The underdevelopment of the party organizations and grouping based on denominational, tribal and even on belonging to some brotherhood, were characteristic for the beginnings of political subjects in Berane district. These were party organizations whose headquarters were settled in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Skopje and whose leaders were as in the case of other districts in the province, often resorted to emphasizing their candidature in them. There were also the individuals on the local political scene, mostly teachers or the civil servants, who were representatives of the party's ideas and programme in their surrounding and therefore also the incumbent candidates of their lists. During parliamentary elections in Berane in 1920 and 1923 the main political rivalry was between members of the radical and democratic party while it was characterised by fragmentation of the party namely emphasizing 'dissident' candidate list as the consequences of political ambitions of the individuals. Regarding the results of elections in 1920 and 1923, generally speaking, it can be said that during the first half of the 20s of the last century Democratic party dominated in Berane district. Berane got 'its' Member of the Parliament - 'a democrat' Pavle Cubrovic, PhD while in 1923 it no longer had its representative in the parliament. Namely, despite Cubrovic's triumph in Berane district, since his candidate list did not get enough votes in the first round of elections, the position of the Member of the Parliament 'escaped' him.