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The Informational Value of Incumbency

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Author Info
Humberto Llavador ()
Carmen Beviá

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Abstract

This paper proposes an argument that explains incumbency advantage without recurring to the collective irresponsibility of legislatures. For that purpose, we exploit the informational value of incumbency: incumbency confers voters information about governing politicians not available from challengers. Because there are many reasons for high reelection rates different from incumbency status, we propose a measure of incumbency advantage that improves the use of pure reelection success. We also study the relationship between incumbency advantage and ideological and selection biases. An important implication of our analysis is that the literature linking incumbency and legislature irresponsibility most likely provides an overestimation of the latter.

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File URL: http://www.econ.upf.edu/docs/papers/downloads/962.pdf
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra in its series Economics Working Papers with number 962.

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Date of creation: Apr 2006
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Handle: RePEc:upf:upfgen:962

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Web page: http://www.econ.upf.edu/

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Related research
Keywords: Incumbency; information; candidate quality; selection bias; ideology;

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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
D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy-Making and Implementation

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. McKelvey, Richard D. & Riezman, Raymond., 1990. "Seniority in Legislatures," Working Papers 725, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences. [Downloadable!]
  2. David S. Lee & Enrico Moretti & Matthew J. Butler, 2004. "Do Voters Affect Or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U. S. House," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 119(3), pages 807-859, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Alesina, Alberto, 1988. "Credibility and Policy Convergence in a Two-Party System with Rational Voters," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(4), pages 796-805, September.
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Cited by:
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  1. Roland Hodler & Simon Loertscher & Dominic Rohner, 2007. "Inefficient Policies and Incumbency Advantage," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 996, The University of Melbourne. [Downloadable!]
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This page was last updated on 2009-11-27.

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