Off-Cycle and Out of Office: Election Timing and the Incumbency Advantage

2018 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin de Benedictis-Kessner
Keyword(s):  
Incumbency Advantage ◽  
Election Timing

scholarly journals Campaign Duration and Election Outcomes

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-73
Author(s):  
Costas Panagopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Aggregate Data ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Cycle ◽  
Incumbency Advantage ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Election Timing ◽  
Candidate Performance

Does campaign duration affect election outcomes? To date, this question has largely evaded political scientists, but it is reasonable to expect systematic links between campaign length and candidate performance in elections. We hypothesize that longer campaigns would help challengers' electoral fortunes, thereby curbing incumbency advantage and potentially boosting competitiveness in elections. Using two data sources, aggregate data from U.S. House elections between 1994 and 2006 and ANES survey data from the 2002 election cycle, we find little evidence to support contentions that campaign length affects election outcomes or candidate familiarity. The results we report suggest the political consequences, intended or not, to choices about election timing are likely minimal.

Electoral incumbency advantages and the introduction of fixed parliamentary terms in the United Kingdom

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Schleiter ◽  
Valerie Belu
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Potential Outcomes ◽  
Incumbency Advantage ◽  
Unfair Advantage ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Election Timing

Can fixing the parliamentary term be expected to reduce electoral incumbency advantages? The United Kingdom’s 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act aims to prevent incumbents from scheduling early elections for political benefit. Yet, the view that flexible election timing gives incumbents an unfair advantage remains contested. The literature on opportunistic election calling—including the signalling effects of this strategy and the competence of governments that select it—lends support to both sides in the debate. This article examines how far the divergent arguments apply in the United Kingdom. Using observed outcomes and a potential outcomes approach, we investigate to what effect incumbents have used election timing. Our results suggest that governments can improve their re-election chances when they have discretion to time elections to favourable circumstances instead of facing voters at set intervals when conditions may not be advantageous. Fixed parliamentary terms are likely to reduce that incumbency advantage significantly.

The Element of Surprise: Election Timing and Opposition Preparedness

2021 ◽  
pp. 001041402199717
Author(s):  
Charles T. McClean
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Conventional Wisdom ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Alternative Mechanism ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Electoral Accountability ◽  
Fixed Effects Models ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Election Timing

How can incumbent governments benefit when they control the timing of elections? The conventional wisdom is that incumbents gain an advantage by timing elections to coincide with favorable economic conditions. An alternative mechanism that has received less attention is the element of surprise: the incumbent’s ability to exploit the opposition’s lack of election preparedness. I theorize and empirically test this surprise mechanism using candidate-level data from Japanese House of Representatives elections (1955–2017). The results show that in surprise elections, opposition parties recruit fewer, lower-quality candidates, spend less money campaigning, coordinate their candidates less effectively, and ultimately receive fewer votes and seats. Evidence from fixed effects models and exogenously timed by-elections further suggest that surprise matters more in shorter, competitive election campaigns and helps incumbents more with confronting inter-party as opposed to intra-party electoral competition. These findings add to our understanding of how strategic election timing can undermine electoral accountability.

Oiling the Wheels of Multi-Party Politics in Africa: How Power Alternation Affects Party Financing in Ghana

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
pp. 666-682
Author(s):  
Joseph Oti Frimpong
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Incumbency Advantage ◽  
Party Funding ◽  
Opposition Parties

Supplementing literature study with in-depth unstructured interviews from the two dominant political parties in Ghana on how they mobilize funds, the key argument of this article is that the loss of a presidential election in Ghana is a reduction in a party’s major income streams. Unlike other studies that look at incumbency advantage in party funding from the angle of governments’ policies that weaken the opposition parties, this article analyses incumbency from their sources of funds. It fulfils two major objectives of identifying the sources of funds of political parties and establishing the link between these sources and incumbency.

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