Incumbent Support Research Articles

The politics of teachers' union endorsements

AbstractSchool board candidates supported by local teachers' unions overwhelmingly win, and we examine the causes and consequences of the “teachers' union premium” in these elections. First, we show that union endorsement information increases voter support. Although the magnitude of this effect varies across ideological and partisan subgroups, an endorsement rarely hurts a candidate's prospects with the electorate. Second, we benchmark the size of the endorsement premium to other well‐known determinants of vote choice in local elections. Perhaps surprisingly, we show the effect can be as large as the impact of shared partisanship, and substantially larger than the boost from endorsements provided by other stakeholders. Finally, examining real‐world endorsement decisions, we find that union support for incumbents hinges on self‐interested pecuniary considerations and is unaffected by performance in improving student academic outcomes. The divergence between what endorsements mean and how voters interpret them has troubling normative democratic implications.

“Don’t worry, be happy (and the vote out the incumbent): economic anxiety and incumbent support”

ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been a substantial upsurge in the cost of living and income inequality across established democracies. These shifts, intensified by recent public health crises and growing political instability, have subjected voters to an extraordinary mix of social, political, and economic uncertainty. Despite widespread doubt about the future, a consistent finding in the economic voting literature highlights that voters’ evaluation of the past economy strongly influences their decision to either reward or penalize incumbents. Additionally, these studies find that voters’ forward-looking evaluations of personal economic conditions and general economic expectations often yield weak or negligible effects. These patterns motivate an important empirical question – why do future-oriented economic evaluations fall short in yielding a more substantial effect on incumbent support amid considerable personal struggle and uncertainty about economic conditions ahead? Grounded in appraisal theories of emotion, our study suggests that these consistent results may stem from existing measures inadequately capturing the multi-dimensional and affective nature of voters’ future economic concerns. Using data from the Canadian province of Ontario, we explore the extent of voters’ economic anxiety, identify the factors influencing these sentiments, and show that economic anxiety weakens support for incumbents in provincial and municipal elections.

How COVID-19 affects voting for incumbents: Evidence from local elections in France.

How do voters react to an ongoing natural threat? Do voters sanction or reward incumbents even when incumbents cannot be held accountable because an unforeseeable natural disaster is unfolding? We address this question by investigating voters' reactions to the early spread of COVID-19 in the 2020 French municipal elections. Using a novel, fine-grained measure of the circulation of the virus based on excess-mortality data, we find that support for incumbents increased in areas that were particularly hard hit by the virus. Incumbents from both left and right gained votes in areas more strongly affected by COVID-19. We provide suggestive evidence for two mechanisms that can explain our findings: an emotional channel related to feelings of fear and anxiety, and a prospective-voting channel, related to the ability of incumbents to act more swiftly against the diffusion of the virus than challengers.

Political expectations and electoral responses to wind farm development in Sweden

Wind energy expansion has influenced electoral behavior by decreasing support for incumbents, primarily explained by not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) arguments. However, how does the establishment of wind farms shape electoral behavior when municipal politicians can veto such establishments? Analyzing Sweden, this study shows that voters respond not only by retrospectively evaluating past constructions but also by evaluating parties differently based on their expectations. Our results indicate that parties more likely to approve turbine constructions are punished more than those less expected to do so. Additionally, we find no evidence that the construction of wind turbines influences support for either Green or radical right-wing parties. In conclusion, this study show that the political repercussions of wind farm expansion are multifaceted, influenced by a combination of past actions, future expectations, and the ideological stances of political parties.

It’s the robots, stupid? Automation risk, labour market resources and incumbent support in Europe

As automation challenges labour markets across Europe, research in political science is pointing towards the socially corrosive link between such technological change and political dissatisfaction. In this paper, I extend this research agenda by looking at the relation between automation risk and incumbent support in 20 European countries between 2012 and 2018. I find strong support for the notion that workers with substantial exposure to automation risk are more likely to reject governments at the ballot box. Importantly, however, these findings indicate that this anti-incumbent voting is less prevalent among theoretically at-risk workers who enjoy some level of protection, in the form of permanent contracts, co-determination rights or higher educational attainment. As such, this paper argues that technological occupation risk should be seen as feeding into broader labour market risks faced by voters.

Government Spending and Voting Behavior

abstract: Does government spending on public goods affect the vote choice of citizens? On one hand, prior research has characterized voters as fiscal conservatives who may turn toward conservative parties when government spending goes up. On the other hand, increased spending may signal that the economy is doing well, which makes progressive parties a more viable option. To adjudicate between both hypotheses, this article draws on a natural experiment, which created exogenous variation in government spending. A discontinuity in the 2011 German census meant that some municipalities saw an unforeseen increase in budgets. Using a regression discontinuity design, the authors show that the increase in budgets and subsequent spending on public goods benefited left-leaning parties but had no detectable effect on incumbent support. To parse out the causal channel, the authors rely on panel evidence and demonstrate that treated residents viewed their economic situation more favorably than did untreated residents, which led the former to espouse progressive parties.

The influence of employees’ work-to-family experiences on their spouses’ intentions to provide social support

ABSTRACT According to the conservation of resources theory and social exchange theory, this paper explores how job incumbents’ work-to-family conflict and enrichment influence their spouses’ satisfaction with their work-family balance, which in turn impacts their spouses’ intentions to provide social support for the job incumbents’ work issues. We employed a mixed-method design. Study 1 involved a field study of a paired sample of 171 job incumbents and their spouses. Study 2 involved a scenario-based experiment (N = 274). The results showed that the relationship between job incumbents’ WFC and their spouses’ intentions to provide social support was mediated by the spouses’ satisfaction with the focal job incumbents’ WFB. We also found that job incumbents’ WFC interacts with WFE to influence their spouses’ intentions to provide social support via their spouses’ satisfaction with their WFB. This study offers new insights into the relationship between work-family experiences and social support.

The electoral risks of austerity

AbstractDoes austerity influence incumbent support? Existing studies struggle with conceptualizing the evolution of austerity's impact over time, estimating a causal effect, and analysing the reactions of different voters. This study theorizes that the effect of austerity on electoral preferences is not immediate, but gradual, as voters find out about the measures' consequences via the media. It leverages a survey in the field at the time of the austerity announcement in Romania in 2010, additional survey data collected immediately after this event and comprehensive daily media coverage to show that austerity measures do not have an immediate impact on incumbent support, anticipated turnout and expressing a vote preference. Instead, there is a gradual effect that is associated with increased media attention to budgetary cuts. This natural experiment allows the estimation of the immediate causal effect of austerity on electoral intentions. Difference‐in‐differences (DID) models show that the announcement triggered a massive loss of support for the incumbent among those who had voted for the party in power only a few months before. Austerity also led to the demobilization of the governing party's supporters. There is no evidence that those most directly affected by the spending cuts are more likely to punish the incumbent party.

Public policy and elections in authoritarian regimes: evidence from the policy on native languages in Russia

AbstractHow might public policy changes affect electoral support for authoritarian regimes? Missing from the existing scholarship, which focuses mostly on regimes generating political budget cycles and manipulating electoral rules, is an exploration of how non-fiscal and non-electoral policies may impact incumbent support. We examine this issue with electoral and census data from one of the world’s most prominent authoritarian regimes – Russia – to evaluate the regime’s 2017 change to the policy governing native language instruction, which curtailed minority students’ ability to learn their native languages and faced opposition in some ethnic regions. Examining panel data on presidential elections using fixed effects models, our results reveal that the regime’s support decreased in titular minority areas in 2018. The results also indicate that some of these patterns emerged in previous national legislative elections and thus cannot be solely attributed to the policy change.

Aid and Radicalization: The Case of Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza

We study how militant political factions use material aid to secure support. We focus on Hamas, a militant faction in the Palestinian Authority. We generate a unique dataset that includes the sources and extent of assistance received by Palestinian households, data on Israeli and Palestinian fatalities, and data on the level of support for particular Palestinian factions. We find that lower-income residents of districts that receive aid from religious charities are more likely to support Hamas. The support patterns identified partly align with the existing theory on armed religious groups as club good providers. We find no evidence that aid affects incumbent support or deters recipients from supporting militants. While it is possible that charities only target districts and households that support them, testing for reverse causality by regressing aid on lagged faction support yields no such evidence.

Debating voter defection in Turkey

ABSTRACT This study examines patterns of voter defection from Turkey’s incumbent AKP amid major economic and democratic decline. As in other electoral autocracies, defectors constitute a small but politically significant group in Turkey, where the opposition’s ability to secure a transition from authoritarianism depends on reducing the incumbent’s vote share. Based on survey data gathered in November 2021 and February 2022, we find that while the high level of partizanship among AKP voters hinders defection, persistent economic and democratic decline still reduces incumbent support. We also found that defections are higher outside of the lowest income group. Our findings have important implications for opposition strategies in electoral autocracies. Directing public debate away from identity issues to economic and democratic problems increases the likelihood of defection. In addition, offering voters clear superior alternatives decreases the cost of uncertainty that comes with change and increases the likelihood of defection.

Actors in multi-sector transitions - discourse analysis on hydrogen in Germany

With net-zero emission goals, low-carbon transitions enter a new phase of development, leading to new challenges for policymaking and research. Multiple transitions unfold in parallel across different sectors. This involves a broad range of technologies, while actors engage in increasingly complex discourses. Here, we study the discourses on hydrogen in Germany. Based on the analysis of 179 newspaper articles from 2016 to 2020, we find that a diverse set of actors, including many industry incumbents, speak favorably about hydrogen, emphasizing economic opportunities and its relevance for the energy transition, whereas skeptics highlight its low energy efficiency and expected scarcity. With the help of discourse network analysis, we identify three emerging conflicts around the use, production, and import of hydrogen. We explain these conflicts and the widespread support of incumbents with a conceptual framework that captures the complex interplay of sectoral contexts, specific technologies and actor interests.

How incumbent politicians respond to the enactment of a programmatic policy: evidence from snow subsidies

AbstractMore than 50 studies have examined the programmatic incumbent support hypothesis, which posits that once enacted, programmatic policies increase electoral support for the incumbent. Despite the careful attention to causal inference in this work, empirical findings have been strikingly inconsistent. We make the case that these inconsistent results are likely explained by incumbents' strategic responses to the enactment of a programmatic policy. Specifically, incumbents have good reasons to distribute different amounts of non-programmatic goods to voters who do and do not receive a programmatic policy. To examine this conjecture, we turn to the case of Japan, where municipalities receive allocations of non-programmatic goods and vary in their eligibility for a programmatic policy (a snow subsidy) according to plausibly exogenous factors. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design, we find that municipalities receiving the programmatic policy receive systematicallymorenon-programmatic goods than municipalities that do not.

Urban home values and multi-level political accountability: Evidence from Calgary, Canada

ABSTRACT While retrospective economic voting—that is, punishing or rewarding incumbent politicians for the performance of the economy—is well studied, much less is known about the electoral implications of the housing market across levels of government. Which, if any, levels of government are judged on the basis of real estate prices? This piece considers this question, using panel survey data and home assessment data from Calgary, Alberta, a city where housing prices have stagnated in recent years relative to other Canadian cities. We find that support for incumbents at both the local and provincial levels are related to impressions of the direction of the housing market. City councilors, however, are the only politicians who seem to be held accountable for the performance of the housing market. Our results suggest that, at the local level, housing prices are an important consideration for economic voting.

Interstate Conflict Can Reduce Support for Incumbents: Evidence from the Israeli Electorate and the Yom Kippur War

Does war affect support for incumbent leaders and parties? The literature is divided with studies reporting negative, positive, or null-effects. Many studies analyze the consequences of foreign intervention, and less is known about the political costs of wars fought close to home. Building on theories of retrospective voting, we theorize that wars inform voters about leader’s competence, and in turn affect mass attitudes and behaviors. Leveraging the unexpected onset of the 1973 Yom Kippur war which interrupted an ongoing Israeli public opinion poll, and voting records from four national elections linked with Israeli military fatality data, we demonstrate that despite the ultimate military victory, the war and its casualties reduced support for incumbent parties and leaders, and increased support for the opposition. By moving beyond foreign interventions, we provide strong evidence that wars over a country’s core territory can be politically costly for incumbent leaders and parties.

Punishing or rallying ‘round the flag? Heterogeneous effects of terrorism in South Tyrol

AbstractThis paper studies the electoral effects of terrorism by examining a rich panel dataset on the South Tyrolean case. A Northern and predominantly German‐speaking region of Italy, South Tyrol was the theater of a long war of attrition fought between the majority language group and the Italian state for autonomy and independence. Using detailed information on the whole record of 337 terrorist attacks occurring between 1956 and 1991, I find that (i) low‐scale terror or attacks which targeted police forces negatively affected incumbent support; (ii) high‐scale terror or attacks which targeted civilians or caused deaths were conducive of rally‐round‐the‐Italian‐flag momenta; (iii) support to terrorists sensibly drops after deadly attacks. These findings highlight the role of terror intensity and violence in driving the impact of terrorism on incumbent actors and terrorist organizations and help reconcile the coexistence of seemingly contradictory effects of terrorism documented in the literature.

Priors Rule: When Do Malfeasance Revelations Help Or Hurt Incumbent Parties?

Abstract Effective policy-making requires that voters avoid electing malfeasant politicians. However, informing voters of incumbent malfeasance in corrupt contexts may not reduce incumbent support. As our simple learning model shows, electoral sanctioning is limited where voters already believed incumbents to be malfeasant, while information’s effect on turnout is non-monotonic in the magnitude of reported malfeasance. We conducted a field experiment in Mexico that informed voters about malfeasant mayoral spending before municipal elections, to test whether these Bayesian predictions apply in a developing context where many voters are poorly informed. Consistent with voter learning, the intervention increased incumbent vote share where voters possessed unfavorable prior beliefs and when audit reports caused voters to favorably update their posterior beliefs about the incumbent’s malfeasance. Furthermore, we find that low and, especially, high malfeasance revelations increased turnout, while less surprising information reduced turnout. These results suggest that improved governance requires greater transparency and citizen expectations.

Monetary technocracy and democratic accountability: how central bank independence conditions economic voting

Central bank independence (CBI) implies that elected governments delegate monetary policy to technocrats in central banks. I argue that given the substantial influence of monetary policy on consumption, investments, exchange rates, capital flows and government spending, all of which critically determine the performance of the economy, CBI can blur the lines of responsibility for economic performance between elected governments and central banks. It can thereby weaken voters’ ability and willingness to electorally punish (or reward) governments on the basis of economic outcomes. Utilizing data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I test how CBI conditions the effects of macroeconomic performance on electoral support for incumbents in 38 countries from 1996 to 2016. The results show that CBI significantly attenuates the reward and punishment mechanism of elections based on economic records. The finding of this article sheds new lights on how the problem of democratic accountability caused by the rise of CBI actually materializes in elections, the most important sanctioning mechanism of democracy. Further, it identifies CBI as another crucial condition that can explain variations in the magnitude of economic voting across countries, as yet unexplored in the election literature.

Кто виноват? Централизация и электоральное поведение титульных этносов в республиках России

Introduction: the electoral behavior of voters in many Russian republics is characterized by higher support for incumbents. However, recently some of them have witnessed a decrease in electoral support for the Russian president from representatives of the titular ethnic groups. Objectives: to find the answer to the following research question: why do representatives of the titular ethnic groups reduce electoral support for the Russian president in some ethnic republics, while this does not happen in other republics? Methods: the study uses qualitative data collected by focus groups in four Russian republics: Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Chuvashia, and Komi. Results: the analysis of the data made it possible to identify the main factors that determine the change in the electoral behavior of titular ethnic groups’ representatives. The results of the study suggest that a decrease in the electoral support for the Russian president among the titular ethnic groups occurs only if they consider both levels of government – federal and regional – to blame for the infringement of their ethno-cultural rights. This, in turn, stems from two factors: (1) the fragmented structure of regional elites and (2) the choice of a loyalty strategy by the head of the region in response to pressure from the center. Conclusions: the latest reforms in ethno-linguistic policy in Russia did not remain unnoticed and influenced the electoral processes in a number of ethnic republics. In some of them, the titular ethnic groups significantly reduced the electoral support of the Russian government and ceased to be a significant link in the mechanics of political machines. In others, their electoral behavior remains stable. This allows us to conclude that the structure of the current the Russian president electoral majority is undergoing changes. Moreover, although these changes are not tectonic and are rather local in nature, ignoring them may lead to the fact that researchers and experts in the future may not notice the onset of more fundamental changes.

The Anatomy of Loyalty: Mechanisms for the Formation of an Electoral Super-Majority in the Ethnic Republics of Contemporary Russia

An invariable characteristic of Russian elections in the post-Soviet period is the relatively-high turnout and electoral support of incumbents demonstrated by many of the ethnic republics. The article is devoted to the study of the reasons for the relationship between the ethnic factor and the reproduction of political loyalty. Unlike most previous studies, the authors test existing theories on the basis of opinion polls data rather than official electoral statistics. This makes it possible to include the ethnic characteristics of voters at the individual level in the analysis, rather than regional or local levels. The statistical analysis is complemented by the study of qualitative data in the form of expert interviews and materials from three focus groups conducted in the villages of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. The results obtained make it possible to assert that the political loyalty of the Russian republics is determined not by cultural specifics, but by the nature of the settlement structure. Ethnic republics include a relatively-high proportion of the agrarian population, a significant part of which is represented by ethnic minorities. This overlap of ethnic and rural segments determines the reproduction of the electoral super-majority. However, the nature of this phenomenon is explained not by the “patriarchal culture” of non-Russian ethnic groups, but by the institutional capabilities of the local administration to monitor and control the political behavior of rural voters. The study also made it possible to clarify the role of the ethnic factor in contemporary electoral processes, which also affects the reproduction of political loyalty not only to the heads of the republics, but also to non-ethnic federal political actors. However, its influence is also conditioned by the political and institutional characteristics of the ethnic republics, and not by the cultural characteristics of the titular ethnic groups.