Is There An Incumbency Advantage or Cost of Ruling in Proportional Election Systems

25 Pages Posted: 22 Jan 2008 Last revised: 23 Apr 2014

See all articles by Che-Yuan Liang

Che-Yuan Liang

Uppsala University - Department of Economics

Date Written: July 26, 2011

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of political representation on electoral outcomes at the party and coalition levels in proportional election systems using data from Swedish local government elections. There are two notions of representation, namely, to hold seats and to belong to the ruling coalition. I refer to the effect of the former as the incumbency effect and the effect of the latter as the ruling effect. The discontinuous variation in the seat share as the vote share varies for parties is used to isolate exogenous variation in incumbency. The discontinuous variation in ruling at the 50% seat share cutoff for coalitions is used in order to exogenous variation in ruling. I find that incumbency determines the distribution of 12% of the total vote, which is similar to the advantage found in majoritarian systems. I find no ruling effect, contrary to the commonly found cost of ruling in proportional systems.

Keywords: incumbency advantage, cost of ruling, proportional election systems, regression discontinuity, local governments

JEL Classification: D72, D73

Suggested Citation

Liang, Che-Yuan, Is There An Incumbency Advantage or Cost of Ruling in Proportional Election Systems (July 26, 2011). Public Choice, Vol. 154, 2013, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1086195 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1086195

Che-Yuan Liang (Contact Author)

Uppsala University - Department of Economics ( email )

Box 513
SE-75120 Uppsala
Sweden

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