Replication data for: Electoral Institutions, Party Strategies, Candidate Attributes, and the Incumbency Advantage

In developed democracies, incumbents are consistently found to have an electoral advantage over their challengers. The normative implications of this phenomenon depend on its sources. Despite a large existing literature, there is little consensus on what the sources are. In this three-paper dissertation, I find that both electoral institutions and the parties behind the incumbents appear to have a larger role than the literature has given them credit for, and that in the U.S. context, between 30 and 40 percent of the incumbents’ advantage is driven by their “scaring off” serious opposition. In “Voting for Parties or for Candidates: Do Electoral Institutions Make a Difference?” I analyze the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) data to put the U.S. case in a comparative context and explore the impact of electoral institutions on voting behavior. My findings suggest that electoral institutions have a substantial effect on the degree to which politics is party-oriented or personalistic, and thus, they might in turn have an impact on the level of incumbency advantage in the elections. In “How Parties Help Their Incumbents Win: Evidence from Spain,” I explore a novel dataset of elections to the Spanish Senate, where the commonly studied sources of incumbency advantage are unlikely to be present and where we can use a precise measure of incumbency advantage. I find that the main source of the senator’s advantage comes from their placement on the ballot by their party leaders. In “Challenger Quality and the Incumbency Advantage,” my co-authors and I provide estimates of the incumbency advantage and the effect of previous office-holding experience that account for the strategic entry in the race by high-quality challengers. For that purpose, we use term limits as an instrument for challenger quality. Studying U.S. state legislatures, we find that between 30 and 40 percent of the inc umbency advantage in state legislative races is the result of scaring off experienced challengers.