Would state legislatures function differently if voters had access to more information about legislative politics? This article traces how variation in local newspaper coverage shapes voter behavior, election outcomes, and legislative behavior in statehouses.
This study asks how political parties divide attention across the past, present and future in campaign communication and whether incumbency shapes emotive rhetoric across these temporal dimensions. Using supervised machine learning to label temporal focus, the author analyzes 621 party manifestos from nine countries spanning 1949–2017 and describes the share of manifesto text devoted to each temporal category. The contribution is a systematic, cross-national description of parties' temporal rhetorical emphasis and how statements about past and present relate to differences in sentiment between incumbents and opposition.
Governments often gain responsibility for ongoing economic issues with time in office, potentially increasing voter accountability. However, if voters are Bayesian learners and accumulate information about government competence over tenure, this accumulated knowledge might crowd out the influence of current economic conditions on voting decisions.
The article explains the incumbency advantage by examining how incumbents signal their ideological positions differently than challengers. It uses voter-level data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and accounts for unobserved district heterogeneity.
Elections often feature unknown candidates, raising questions about how recognition affects support.
Recent studies show incumbency advantage in candidate-centered elections can fuel political dynasties.
Recent research by Aldrich et al., 2017 explored whether donations from leadership political action committees (PACs) are systematically linked to party goals beyond policy influence. However, their model overlooked an important dynamic: these PACs often donate significantly to candidates who don't aid the party in winning seats or maintaining ideological alignment.
This study surveyed staffers from nearly 200 campaigns during the 2012 U.S. elections, asking about expected vote margins.
Researchers analyze Portugal's local elections (278 municipalities) during a constitutional reform that introduced mayoral term limits. This change created an exogenous natural experiment testing incumbency status while keeping partisan affiliation fixed.
The regression discontinuity (RD) design identifies electoral effects but requires that relevant actors lack precise control over outcomes. Recent studies suggested this might not hold in large U.S. House elections, where incumbents often win close races. This paper examines whether such patterns exist elsewhere using data from the U.S. House across different periods and types of elections (statewide, state legislative, mayoral) plus national/local contests in nine other countries. No evidence was found for similar manipulation patterns in these diverse settings. The study also challenges explanations for incumbent success in close races within the U.S. system. Overall, this reinforces that RD assumptions are generally met across electoral contexts and provides guidance for researchers.
What types of candidates depended most on corporate donations in Brazil's 2010 elections for federal deputy? The study aims to identify candidate characteristics associated with higher levels of corporate funding.
High rerunning rates among incumbents and the dominance of two major parties in the United States let U.S.-based studies avoid the selection problem of who chooses to run again. In countries where rerunning is uncommon or parties are fluid, applying U.S. methods can produce sample selection bias and produce misleading estimates of incumbency effects.
Campaign spending by incumbents has surged since 1972, especially in districts where the voter base is not strongly aligned with their party.
A fresh statistical approach for multiparty electoral data promises to transform comparative politics research.