When Do Political Parties Benefit from Incumbents' Personal Vote?: Comparative Analysis Across Different Electoral Systems
43 Pages Posted: 19 Jul 2010 Last revised: 17 Aug 2010
Date Written: 2010
Abstract
Do political parties benefit electorally from a personal vote cultivated by their candidates? How do these benefits vary across electoral systems? This paper explores these questions, so far underaddressed despite their importance, through a comparative analysis of parties’ electoral gains from fielding incumbent candidates. If parties ever benefit from the personal vote of individual incumbents, these extra electoral gains may compromise important democratic functions of elections based on the collective responsibility of parties, such as maintaining collective accountability and providing clear mandates to governing parties (e.g., economic voting). Analyzing district-level aggregate data in nine established democracies, I find that there is indeed a substantial amount of electoral gains for parties from incumbents’ personal vote and these gains vary across electoral systems in a way previously unnoticed. The findings improve our understanding of the cross-system variation in the effectiveness of democratic elections and have implications for the crafting of democratic institutions.
Keywords: Electoral Systems, Personal Vote, Incumbency Advantage, Developed Democracies
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