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

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Author Info
Liang, Che-Yuan () (Department of Economics)

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Abstract

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.

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Paper provided by Uppsala University, Department of Economics in its series Working Paper Series with number 2007:28.

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Length: 20 pages
Date of creation: 19 Dec 2007
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Handle: RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2007_028

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Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
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Related research
Keywords: incumbency advantage; cost of ruling; proportional elections; multiparty systems; local governments; regression-discontinuity;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
D73 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Bureaucracy; Administrative Processes in Public Organizations; Corruption

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