Incumbent Political Party Research Articles

Predictors of mayoral reelection in Romanian local elections. Long-term analysis 1996–2016

This study aims to analyze the mayoral reelection rates in Romanian local elections between 1996 and 2016, a period marked by significant economic and political transitions. Given the post-communist context, understanding these dynamics is crucial for grasping Romania's evolving electoral behavior. In order to evaluate the dynamics of mayoral reelection rates in post-communist Romania, the primary research objective of the study consists in the assessment of the correlation between electoral participation and preferences for the incumbent mayors. In addition to this research objective, the paper aims to evaluate the impact of the ideological polarization in shaping electoral decision. An important research objective highlights the association between electorate's education level and political preferences for the incumbent political parties. Besides these objectives, the paper stresses the importance of the economic factors for predicting the dynamics of Romanian’ mayoral reelection rates. Using a quantitative research design based on nonlinear statistical regressions, the study highlights the importance of both ideological and economic vote in mayoral reelection. Moreover, statistical results indicate that both the interactions between left-right ideological polarization, secondary education and economic efficiency are significant predictors for explaining Romania's electoral behavior over time. The novelty of the study lies in the use of these interactions between ideology, education and economy for providing a deeper perspective on the mayoral reelection dynamics. These empirical findings are relevant not only for scholars but also for political decision-makers or electoral strategists, providing evidence related with electoral behavior in Romanian local elections.

Electoral Cycles in Fiscal Rules: International Empirical Evidence

Abstract Using panel data from 99 countries over the period of 1985–2020, this study aims to uncover that fiscal rules work in electoral cycles. The results show that fiscal rules are less likely to be implemented in the pre-election year. We also find that this loosening in fiscal rules is especially prominent in cases when the incumbent political party can wield significant political power, where countries are less developed economically and politically, and where the management of fiscal rules is more likely to be exposed to discretionary interventions. Our findings are aligned with the opportunistic political budget cycles, in which politicians exploit fiscal policies and systems to serve their own political incentives. These results suggest that even fiscal rules, which are designed to prevent political pressure, are also subject to political process. (JEL codes: D72, D78, E32, E62, H11, and H60).

The effect of regime change on entrepreneurship: A real options approach with evidence from US gubernatorial elections

Although political turnover is said to be a healthy component of the business environment, the literature is equivocal about the effects of regime change on early-stage entrepreneurial activity. I present incumbent displacement—the electoral defeat of an incumbent political party's candidate—as a source of regime change, and I analyze how this affects business formation through the lens of real options theory. I test my theory using US gubernatorial elections from 2004 to 2022, leveraging a Regression Discontinuity design to compare changes in business formation trends following elections where a challenger party candidate wins or loses by a close margin. I find that regime change reduces venture creation activity for growth-oriented ventures specifically. I also find evidence of a partial rebound in subsequent months—suggestive that some entrepreneurs delay entry while others permanently abandon their ventures.

The Public Budget’ Coverage of the Electoral Campaigns and Elections (2017-2024) and the Prevention of the Abuse of State Resources for Free and Fair Elections in Albania

This paper aims to analyze the use of public budgets to finance the electoral process, including electoral campaigns and elections of the political parties, candidates and other electoral subjects. The focus in this paper is in organizing free and fair elections, by preventing the abuse of the state resources, considered as one of the main deficiencies of the new democracies, including Albania from the year 1991- onward. The abuse of state resources, as an important feature of political finance, focuses on the problems resulting from the undue influence of the incumbent political party that wants to stay in power as long as possible. It is related with the funds or other resources, gained by political parties and candidates that benefit the incumbent party, and it results in undue influence of the later, and prevents other political parties and candidates from having a fair electoral contest. The main research question of this paper is: what are the programs and activities that are funded by the public (national) budgets related with the parliamentary and local elections and what are the financing’ regulations and their effects? Also, does the government create a fair starting point for all of the political parties and candidates, as a mean to preventing the abuse of state resources? As a result, this paper will study the approved budgets and the differences that arise from year 2017- until now, and it will analyze the total spending or expenditures for the elections, given to CEC and to the electoral subjects. The methodology used here is the combination of qualitative methods, and by using primary and secondary sources of information from different international and national relevant institutions and the analysis of the public budgets, for the budgetary years of 2017-2024.
 
 Received: 12 February 2024 / Accepted: 17 March 2024 / Published: 23 March 2024

Determinants of public investment for port authorities using port-level data: An analysis of the Spanish port system

This study analyses the economic and political determinants of Spanish port authorities' public investment from 2000 to 2016 using port-level data. We distinguish two types of investment: (i) infrastructure and capacity; (ii) logistics and intermodal transport. We estimate the empirical specification considering dynamic effects and endogeneity. Unlike previous empirical studies in which aggregate port investment was considered, our results show that both economic criteria and political factors matter in the Spanish port investment allocation. We also find that the relevance of the political factors differs by the type of port investment. In this sense, we show that the coincidence between the incumbent political party in the central and local governments influences the port investment related to infrastructure and capacity, whereas the coincidence between the incumbent political party in the central and regional governments affects logistics and intermodal transport investment.

Africa at the Crossroads: An Overview of the Covid-19 Pandemic and its Drama in Tanzania

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China, in early 2019 has massively changed global lives. Diverse strategies led by WHO were put in place promptly for dealing with the situation at different global and individual levels. Africa as an integral part of the world, was not side-lined, despite the impact of the pandemic was not seriously felt compared to other continents. Since the Covid-19 declaration as one of the world’s most deadly diseases, the Tanzania government has taken paradoxical and exclusively apparent tactics to curb the disease, deviating from the scientific approach. The country relied on and insisted on traditional herbs as the best approach to tackle the situation where the political class led by example. This move was championed by late Tanzania’s president John Pombe Magufuli and his entire government officials before his departure despite some standing opposition. This piece of writing was produced to respond to the prompt change in trajectory, perceptions, and approaches towards the disease by the political class of the same government after Magufuli’s absence. Data deduced from speeches of government officials, published and unpublished records on the pandemic justify massive confusion to Tanzanians of different calibres. Both medical and nonmedical practitioners were at a crossroads with only the political class running the changing show. The findings concluded that the change of position of the government officials of the same incumbent political party had affected the current scientific approach insisted on by the government machines in Tanzania, which in turn created a divided community.

Political incumbency effects in India: a regional analysis

The significance of a study of political incumbency and the factors influencing it stems from the fact that it directly affects the behaviour of the incumbent political party and its accountability to the electorate. We use data on Parliamentary Elections in India from 1980 to 2014 to tease out evidence of incumbency advantage. We employ Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to estimate the incumbency effect. Our results indicate the absence of any incumbency effect when considering all elections in India together. This finding is at odds with the research reported so far. To explain our contrary result, we drilled down deeper to obtain a more granular view of the incumbency effect in India. We do this across various regions of India. The results show that north Indian states generally show strong evidence of incumbency disadvantage while south Indian states show strong evidence of incumbency advantage. We also show that incumbency advantage has increased over time

Do Credit Rating Agencies Influence Elections?

Abstract We show that credit rating agencies can influence political elections. We find that incumbent political parties experience an increase in their vote shares following municipal bond upgrades. The evidence is consistent with rating agencies affecting elections indirectly by expanding local governments’ debt capacity and directly through an impact on voters’ perceptions of the quality of incumbent politicians. To identify these effects, we examine election outcomes within neighboring counties by exploiting exogenous variation in municipal bond ratings due to Moody’s recalibration of its scale in 2010.

Holding “free and unfair elections”: the electoral containment strategies used by incumbent political parties in Albania to secure their grip on power

The purpose of this article is to highlight the clientelistic strategies and informal practices that the ruling political parties in Albania use during the elections to ensure an unfair advantage in their favour over the opposition challengers. One of the main characteristics of the political developments of the transition period in Albania since 1991 has been the flourishing of informal practices and clientelist networks of political parties within state structures, which has produced an extreme politicization of these institutions. These strategies that in general terms we label as “clientelistic” and that have been used to a large extent by the incumbent political parties have had a direct negative impact on the conduct of free and fair elections in Albania by distorting their main goal: to reflect the will of the people. This is because such clientelist strategies, together with the informal practices/mechanisms that accompany them, have influenced the creation of an unlevelled playing field, and have produced a hyperincumbency advantage in the electoral contests between political parties in Albania. The case of the recent elections held in Albania on 25 April 2021 will be the empirical case of this study, in which are evidenced the electoral containment strategies and practices that the ruling political party used to provide an unfair advantage in its favour and to secure its grip on power.

Electoral support and militants’ targeting strategies

Militant groups that are in armed conflict with a government often coexist with political parties that have ethnic or ideological connections to them. In this article, we explore the extent to which electoral support received by militant associated opposition parties and nationally incumbent political parties influences subnational variation in militant attacks. We argue, and empirically demonstrate, that militants strategically target localities where the levels of electoral support for the opposition party and the nationally incumbent party are close in an effort to negatively influence the electoral performance of the incumbent party. To illustrate this dynamic we examine subnational data from 1995 to 2015 Turkish legislative elections and attacks organized by the Kurdish militants within the same time period. We also examine the impact of June 2015 legislative elections on militant attacks until the snap elections in November 2015. Our empirical examination shows that militants target localities where electoral support for the governing party and Kurdish opposition party is close. Moreover, increase in violence negatively influences the electoral performance of the governing party. However, it does not consistently have a significant influence on the opposition. The findings illustrate that militants strategically choose the location of their attacks based on electoral dynamics, and attacks can pose an electoral challenge to the governing party.

The neighbourhood effect in economic voting: the association between local unemployment figures and national economic perceptions and incumbent voting in Belgium, 2009–2019

ABSTRACT While economic voting theory assumes that voters respond to economic conditions, critics have argued that most voters lack an adequate understanding of key national economic indicators. In this paper, we investigate the occurrence of a neighbourhood effect, where citizens can observe unemployment levels in their own local communities. Using both official statistics and survey data of three recent election studies in Belgium, we assess whether local unemployment levels are associated with the assessment of the national economy, and incumbent voting. While the results show that the local unemployment level is strongly associated with the assessment of the national economy, results regarding a direct association with supporting incumbent political parties are mixed. We argue that the neighbourhood effect is an important mechanism in economic voting, as citizens react to a neighbourhood effect in their assessment of the state of the national economy.

Hate Crimes Against Minorities in India

Abstract Violence against Muslims and Dalits in India has drastically increased since the incumbent political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), came to power in 2014. Around 85% of perpetrators are alleged to have been associated either with the BJP or its sister Hindu organizations. In at least some cases, law enforcement agencies have been either indifferent or hostile to the victims. Such crimes may be considered as hate crimes, yet an understanding of this concept — as a tool which accounts for the criminality of individual acts while appreciating the systemic prejudices that motivate them — is lacking in Indian law. This warrants consideration of international criminal law, as a discourse which may complement and support domestic reform, since hate crimes constitute an inhumane affront to the values of dignity and liberty which underlie international core crimes. In this context, this article examines whether the elements of crimes against humanity, particular those of murder and persecution, may be applied to the recent events in India.

Election Outcomes and Individual Subjective Wellbeing in Great Britain

Exploiting novel longitudinal data on individuals in Great Britain matched to their parliamentary constituency, we find that supporting the incumbent political party, at both the national and constituency levels, exerts a positive influence on individual subjective wellbeing. This relationship varies across different measures of subjective wellbeing, gender and personal characteristics. We then implement a regression discontinuity in time design to estimate the impact of a quasi‐natural experiment, where we exploit the timing of the survey around the 2010 election date in order to identify a causal relationship. We find that Liberal Democrat supporters have approximately one‐unit higher level of overall life satisfaction after their party’s electoral success.

The politicization of immigration in Italy. Who frames the issue, when and how

AbstractItaly is one of the most representative ‘new immigration countries.’ Between the 1980s and the 1990s, it became a major country of destination for immigrants coming from Asia, Middle East, and North Africa. As a result, since the mid-90s, immigration has gained salience within the Italian political debate. Building on the existing literature on agenda-setting and framing studies, this article studies the evolution of the immigration issue in Italy over the last two decades. It focuses on the framing and, more specifically, the position political actors tend to adopt when debating on immigration. In particular, the main research questions are: to what extent is the framing of immigration associated with the traditional left vs. right spectrum? Do incumbent political parties tend to adopt a different position toward immigration than opposition parties? This article analyses party competition dynamics over the immigration issue in Italy from 1995 to 2011. The author carried out a political-claim analysis of articles from two Italian national daily newspapers. Findings show that immigration is more a positional issue than a valence one. Political actors’ positions towards migration appear to be anchored to the old left vs. right dimension of the political conflict. This demonstrates that parties’ engagement within the political conflict goes beyond electoral campaigns. Finally, being in government seems to play a crucial role in ‘softening’ the way party actors frame immigration, in terms of both the arguments used and the pro- or anti-immigration positions adopted.

Agents of the Regime? Traditional Leaders and Electoral Politics in South Africa

Traditional leaders are often given subnational authority in developing democracies. Although ubiquitous, the electoral consequences of their power have received little attention, often due to empirical challenges. We argue that traditional leaders, whose power and resources largely depend on the state, have incentives to support incumbent political parties who can guarantee their survival and provide them with rents. We study this quid pro quo in the former Bantustans of South Africa, showing that an alignment between the incumbent African National Congress and chiefs maps to increased electoral support for the party. Our results suggest that chiefs boost African National Congress vote share by between 6.6 and 8.2 percentage points in the Bantustans, translating into a change in the national vote of between 2 and 2.5 percentage points. Our empirical strategy rules out that our results are driven by differences in ethnicity, race, or economic circumstances, which commonly confound the presence of traditional authorities.

Not to the highest bidder: the failure of incumbency in the Zambian 2011 elections

ABSTRACTIncumbent political parties in emerging democracies tend to use clientelism and state resources to mobilise electoral support. In most cases, they go on to win these electoral contests. However, this paper uses the Zambian example to demonstrate that mere incumbency may not always win elections. Despite the advantages of incumbency, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) lost the 2011 elections to the opposition Patriotic Front (PF). To explain this, the paper argues that the qualities of an incumbent political party matter. For the MMD, the paper identifies three major contextual variables which undermined incumbency: first, the internal long-term but sustained centrifugal conditions which systematically eroded the party’s strength. Second, the public perception of the MMD as a decaying and recalcitrant party which increasingly detached itself from the electorate. Third, the presence of a surging populist, grassroots-based opposition political party.

Intermediary Capabilities in the Context of Challenging State Dynamics

The intertwined nature of social, economic, and environmental problems has led to an increase in cross-sector partnerships to create collaborative value. Intermediary organizations can enable these partnerships, but the context shapes what is needed. There is a need to understand how different contexts shape how intermediaries create value. This study fills this gap by focusing on intermediaries in Johannesburg, South Africa. We find there is significant unrealized collaborative value in the context studied. This is due to the coexistence of a limited state combined with a strong incumbent political party. While the existing scholarship on intermediaries is relevant, two particular capabilities are especially important in such a context. First, intermediaries need to focus on seizing opportunities to generate short-term value in order to build trust among partners. Second, they need to strengthen the capacity of the state through lateral influence. Weak and limited states combined with strong political regimes are common in many nations, especially those in transition. In addition, there are a variety of contemporary global political pressures that emphasize greater state autonomy. These contextual pressures make these findings particularly relevant to partnership scholars and practitioners.

Debates Over Constitutionalism in Recent Japanese Constitutional Scholarship

The purpose of this paper is to survey the debates over constitutionalism in recent Japanese constitutional scholarship. Section 1 introduces the definition of constitutionalism proposed by the most well-known Japanese constitutional scholar and supported by a majority of scholars. It then describes the historical development of constitutionalism from its birth in England to its current form including the judicial review system, followed by the consistency of constitutionalism with welfare state or democracy. In section 2, the scope of constitutionalism is demonstrated through current leading scholars’ literature. This section also discusses the classification of constitutionally guaranteed human rights, the active role of the people in the administration of the state, and the difference between constitutional order and constitutional law. Section 3 considers whether constitutionalism can exist across state borders. It distinguishes the globalization of constitutionalism from global constitutionalism. Section 4 discusses the most controversial issues of constitutionalism in Japan: pacifism and constitutional amendment. Nowadays, the term ‘constitutionalism’ is frequently used in political contexts in Japan concerning a constitutional amendment draft released by one of the incumbent political parties and the recently established Legislation for Peace and Security. Further, Japanese constitutional scholars’ majority views about constitutionalism are discussed along with the influential critics.

A Theory of Political Entrenchment

Can an incumbent political party increase its chances at re-election by implementing inefficient policies that harm its constituency? This paper studies the possibility of such a phenomenon, which we label political entrenchment. We use a two-party dynamic model of redistribution with probabilistic voting. Political entrenchment by the Left occurs only if incumbency rents are sufficiently high. Low-skill citizens may vote for this party even though they rationally expect the adoption of these policies. We discuss: the possibility of entrenchment by the Right; the scope for commitment to avoid entrenchment policies; and the effect of state capacity, income inequality and party popularity on the likelihood of entrenchment. We illustrate our theory with a number of historical examples.

The parties in court: American political parties under the Constitution

Chapter 1: American Political Parties, Government Regulation & Constitutional Law Chapter 2: The Judicial Regulation of the Internal Activities of Political Parties Chapter 3: The Regulation of Political Parties in the Electoral Process Chapter 4: The Regulation of Incumbent Political Parties Chapter 5: Summary and Recommendations Bibliography Cases Cited