Is There an Incumbency Advantage or a Cost of Ruling in Proportional Election Systems?

Arbeitspapier

This paper investigates the effect of political representation on the electoral outcome at the party level in a proportional multiparty election system using data from Swedish local government elections. There are two notions of representation in a council; the first is to hold seats, and the second is 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 effect of ruling. To identify causal effects, I use the discontinuous variations in the number of seats and ruling (as a coalition receives a majority of the seats) to isolate exogenous variation in incumbency and ruling respectively. I find an advantage of 0.11 percent of the votes for each percent of incumbency. 11 percent of the votes in an election are therefore determined by incumbency, a figure close to the advantage found in majoritarian systems. However, the advantage differs significantly between parties. Further, I find no effects of ruling, contrary to the commonly found cost of ruling in proportional systems.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Working Paper ; No. 2007:28

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption
• Subject: incumbency advantage ; cost of ruling ; proportional elections ; multiparty systems ; local governments ; regression-discontinuity ; Wahlsystem ; Kommunale Selbstverwaltung ; Schätzung ; Wahlverhalten ; Schweden

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Liang, Che-Yuan
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Uppsala University, Department of Economics
• (where): Uppsala
• (when): 2007

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/82687
• URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-12430
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET