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Incumbency Disadvantage of Political Parties: The Role of Policy Inertia and Prospective Voting

Author

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  • Satyajit Chatterjee
  • Burcu Eyigungor

Abstract

We document that postwar U.S. elections show a strong pattern of ?incumbency disadvantage\": If a party has held the presidency of the country or the governorship of a state for some time, that party tends to lose popularity in the subsequent election. To explain this fact, we employ Alesina and Tabellini's (1990) model of partisan politics, extended to have elections with prospective voting. We show that inertia in policies, combined with sufficient uncertainty in election outcomes, implies incumbency disadvantage. We find that inertia can cause parties to target policies that are more extreme than the policies they would support in the absence of inertia and that such extremism can be welfare reducing.

Suggested Citation

  • Satyajit Chatterjee & Burcu Eyigungor, 2019. "Incumbency Disadvantage of Political Parties: The Role of Policy Inertia and Prospective Voting," Working Papers 19-7, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedpwp:19-7
    DOI: 10.21799/frbp.wp.2019.07
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    Cited by:

    1. Marina Azzimonti & Laura Karpuska & Gabriel Mihalache, 2023. "Bargaining Over Taxes And Entitlements In The Era Of Unequal Growth," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 64(3), pages 893-941, August.
    2. Gersbach, Hans & Jackson, Matthew O. & Muller, Philippe & Tejada, Oriol, 2023. "Electoral competition with costly policy changes: A dynamic perspective," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 214(C).
    3. Marina Azzimonti & Gabriel P. Mihalache & Laura Karpuska, 2020. "Bargaining over Taxes and Entitlements," NBER Working Papers 27595, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Marina Azzimonti & Laura Karpuska & Gabriel Mihalache, 2020. "Bargaining over Mandatory Spending and Entitlements," Department of Economics Working Papers 20-02, Stony Brook University, Department of Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    rational partisan model; incumbency disadvantage; policy inertia; prospective voting; median voter;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General

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