two party competition with persistent policies abstract when campaigning for reelection incumbent parties promises to voters are constrained by their records in office while opposition parties can use their time away from power to develop new platforms in this paper i introduce incumbent policy persistence in a dynamic game of electoral competition between two policy motivated parties and characterise the long run outcomes of its markov perfect equilibria incumbents reduced policy flexibility leads to alternation in power and policy dynamics that converge to alternations at policies equally preferred by the median voter convergence of policies towards the median is a robust equilibrium outcome while convergence to the median is not while alternations far from the median are never limits of equilibrium dynamics alternations close to the median can be reached only if policy dynamics start exactly there i show that these results are robust to voters being forward looking and to limited policy commitment by parties

candidate reputations and the incumbency effect abstract a major shortcoming of the classical median voter model is that its central prediction convergence of platforms to the median voter s ideal is seldom observed one reason is that the classical model neglects the importance of voter expectations as a determinant of votes here we associate voters expectations about candidates with past as well as current candidate pronouncements and assume that incumbents whose actions are consistent with their reputations are perceived as less risky than challengers in equilibrium candidates choose distinct platforms typically neither adopts the median voter s ideal point either candidate may win depending on how well the incumbent s reputation reflects current voter tastes and how relatively risky the electorate perceives the challenger to be

party system institutionalization and government formation in new democracies party systems provide the essential structure of the coalition bargaining environment stability in party systems ensures the presence of regularities that can be observed in government formation but most empirical research focuses on established democracies in new democracies party systems are less institutionalized which means that interactions between parties can be unpredictable and has significant implications for coalition formation this article presents the first study of coalition formation in new democracies that employs an empirical design comparable to that of the leading research on western europe the author uses a new data set of potential coalitions in central and eastern europe to examine three explanations for government formation that arise when party systems are weakly institutionalized the results show first that incumbency is a disadvantage for governments in new democracies when formation occurs postelection this disadvantage is due to high levels of electoral volatility caused by policy failure and clientelistic practices incumbents are advantaged when formation takes place midterm as weak party system institutionalization leads to an inchoate pattern of interaction between opposition parties which therefore fail to provide a viable alternative second the presence of former dominant parties influences government formation by stifling the development of programmatic competition instead programmatic competition is subjugated to contestation based on historical enmities and third established parties collude to exclude new parties from coalition formation a possible indicator that a party system is becoming more institutionalized the article provides new insights into the importance of routinized and stable political practices and institutions

incumbency advantages in the canadian parliament we apply a regression discontinuity approach to determine incumbency advantages in the canadian parliament finding that incumbents enjoy a 9 4 11 2 increased probability of winning over non incumbents owing to the presence of multiple parties an incumbency advantage in terms of vote share does not always translate to an increased probability of winning because incumbents do not necessarily obtain votes from their closest opponent also under the assumption that strategic exit is not an issue we are able to split the incumbency advantage into party incumbency and individual candidate incumbency components finding that the advantage is almost entirely due to the individual on utilise une approche par la methode de regression avec discontinuite pour determiner les avantages qu il y a aetre l elu en place dans les elections au parlement du canada on decouvre que les elus en place ont une probabilite de gagner de 9 4 a 11 2 de plus que leurs adversaires a cause de la presence de multiples partis politiques l avantage de l elu en place en termes de proportion du vote ne se traduit pas toujours par une probabilite accrue de gagner parce que les elus en place ne capturent pas necessairement les votes de leur plus proche adversaire de plus en presumant qu il ne s agit pas de sortie strategique on peut departager l avantage de l elu en place en composantes correspondant a l effet de parti et l effet de l individu on decouvre que l avantage est presque completement attribuable a l individu

decentralisation and accountability in infrastructure delivery in developing countries many developing countries are experimenting with decentralisation of public service delivery to elected local governments instead of bureaucrats appointed by a central government we study the resulting implications in a theoretical model in which the central government is uninformed about local need and unable to monitor service allocations bureaucrats charge bribes for services as monopoly providers resulting in underprovision of services especially for the poor local governments are directly responsive to their citizens needs but may be subject to capture by elites effects of decentralisation on service volumes efficiency and equity are analysed under different financing arrangements for local governments the theme of the 2004 world development report is summarised by its opening paragraph too often services fail poor people in access in quantity in quality but the fact that there are strong examples where services do work means governments and citizens can do better how by putting poor people at the center of service provision by enabling them to monitor and discipline service providers by amplifying their voice in policymaking and by strengthening the incentives for providers to serve the poor problems of accountability associated with traditional modes of delivery involving centralised bureaucracies include cost padding service diversion limited responsiveness to local needs limited access and high prices charged especially to the poor 1 many developing countries have thus begun to experiment with initiatives to increase accountability of service providers by providing greater control rights to citizen groups these include decentralisation of service delivery to local governments community participation direct transfers to households and contracting out delivery to private providers and ngos the programmes include a wide range of infrastructure services water sanitation electricity telecommunications roads and social services education health and welfare programmes countries where such trends have gathered

capture and governance at local and national levels 135 despite the importance of this issue not much systematic research appears to have been devoted to assessing the relative susceptibility of national and local governments to interestgroup capture here we describe a model of two party electoral competition with probabilistic voting behavior and lobbying by specialinterest groups based on david baron 1994 and gene grossman and elhanan helpman 1996 that helps identify determinants of relative capture at different levels of government these include relative levels of voter awareness and interest group cohesiveness electoral uncertainty electoral competition heterogeneity of districts with respect to inequality and the electoral system while some of these uphold the traditional madisonian presumption others are likely to create a tendency for lower capture at the local level so the net effect is theoretically ambiguous this suggests that the extent of relative capture may be context specific and needs to be assessed empirically

a statistical model for multiparty electoral data we propose an internally consistent and comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty district level aggregate election data this model can be used to explain or predict how the geographic distribution of electoral results depends upon economic conditions neighborhood ethnic compositions campaign spending and other features of the election campaign or characteristics of the aggregate areas we also provide several new graphical representations for help in data exploration model evaluation and substantive interpretation although the model applies more generally we use it to help resolve an important controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in great britain contrary to previous analyses which are all based on measures now known to be biased we demonstrate that the incumbency advantage is small but politically meaningful we also find that it differs substantially across the parties about half a percent for the conservatives 1 for the labor party and 3 for the liberal party and its successors also contrary to previous research we show that these effects have not grown in recent years finally we are able to estimate from which party each party s incumbency advantage is predominantly drawn

money and votes reconsidered congressional elections 1972 1982 the evolution of congressional campaign finance over the past decade is characterized by steady growth in campaign spending and other notable changes in campaign finance practices the main purpose of the research reported here was to determine whether these changes have altered the effects of campaign spending on election outcomes this required reexamination of auxiliary questions concerning how sending effects operate and can be measured it also required facing the limits of what analysis of aggregate campaign spending data can tell us about money in elections replication of ols and 2sls analyses of campaign spending effects produced solidly consistent results over the six congressional elections held between 1972 and 1982 taken at face value the evidence is overwhelming that the challenger s level of spending has a strong impact on the vote whereas that of the incumbent has virtually no impact at all but the evidence remains open to doubt on two grounds one is the probable inadequacy of the 2sls model or perhaps any possible model leaving the issue of simultaneity bias unsettled if bias remains the estimates exaggerate the electoral effects of the challenger s campaign expenditures the issue cannot be resolved with more of the same data but rather requires data of a different sort surveys taken over the course of a sample of campaigns would do the trick meanwhile i think it would be foolish to make policy on the assumption that bias is in fact substantial the greatest likelihood remains that restrictions on campaign money will have the general effect of hurting challengers jacobson 1979 the other doubtful albeit equally stable finding is that incumbents do not gain votes by spending in campaigns no incumbent seems to believe it and there is at least circumstantial evidence from for example the 1982 elections that their skepticism is quite justified if so the problem lies in the limits of what aggregate data of the kind analyzed here can tell us few incumbents do not spend heavily when they are strongly challenged if both candidates spend beyond the point needed to become thoroughly familiar to voters then the substance of the campaigns the contents of campaign messages become the dominant factors incumbents may need to spend money in order to change the message as new circumstances arise to frame new issues that would help them most or damage them least to win the battle of establishing the real issues like nonincumbents sitting members may sometimes need to spend beyond a certain threshold to remain competitive but nearly all of them do so when the necessity arises so aggregate spending data are largely uninformative how the money is spent rather than how much is what matters the two most notable developments in congressional campaign finance have opposing implications national party organizations particularly the republican have assumed an increasingly important role in financing campaigns greater central control leads to a more efficient distribution of the party s collective campaign resources which among other things promises to raise the overall level of electoral competition it also leads to more coordinated campaigning with greater emphasis on national themes and programs thus it should foster more cooperation and loyalty among fellow partisans in congress but pacs have also grown in numbers and in financial importance because most concentrate on gaining access to incumbents they do little to make elections more competitive because they usually pursue narrowly defined interests their influence fragments the congress and weakens party coalitions in this and other ways parties and pacs are natural rivals the most consequential decisions taken in the next round in campaign finance policy will be those which affect the relative importance of parties and pacs see u s congress 1984 for comments on this and other current campaign finance issues

the marginals never vanished incumbency and competition in elections to the u s house of representatives 1952 82 the average vote margin enjoyed by incumbent candidates for the u s house of representatives increased sharply during the 1 960s despite this and contrary to assumptions common in the literature on recent congressional elections electoral data show that house incumbents are no safer now than they were in the 1950s the marginals properly defined have not vanished the swing ratio has diminished little if at all and competition for house seats held by incumbents has not declined vote margins increased without adding to incumbent security diminishing competition or dampening swings because the heterogeneity of interelection vote swings increased at the same time

decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries we study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program while governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance decentralizing the delivery system promotes cost effectiveness and improves intraregional targeting at low program scales but interregional targeting may deteriorate as central grants to high poverty regions shrink owing to high capture of local governments by local elites in such regions

do special economic zones induce developmental spillovers evidence from india s states abstract do special economic zones induce local development research drawing on the case of china s special economic zones suggests that subnational polities can target the location of export zones in order to catalyze local and regional socioeconomic development since 2006 a number of indian states have pushed forward similar zones in the face of accusations of land grabbing arguing that the zones will be engines for improvement in exports employment and infrastructure i argue that local development spillovers are an important albeit previously understudied dimension by which to evaluate the effects of special economic zones i then present the first systematic analysis of the developmental effects of india s sezs leveraging an original dataset on their locations together with 2001 and 2011 census data containing a host of social and economic developmental variables the findings show these sezs have failed to bring about local socioeconomic development to explain this absence of developmental spillovers i provide a theoretical framework based on the crucial role of political economy incentive structures facing local politicians i outline the mechanism through which indian state politicians use state owned development corporations for rent capture undermining the potential effectiveness of sezs and leading to their developmental failures the combination of available means for extracting rents and the limited political constraints on such rent extraction leads to a lack of developmental spillovers this framework can also help to explain the difference in the effects of sezs in india and in china these findings have theoretical importance for understanding the conditions under which subnational polities can use export zones and other export policies to catalyze development and practical implications for understanding the mixed pattern of sez success across the world

does legislative turnover adversely affect state expenditure policy evidence from indian state elections the effect of legislative turnover on the size and composition of government expenditures in indian states over the 1980 2000 period is examined the paper finds that excessive turnover in indian state elections results in inefficient government expenditure policy first the higher the turnover the larger the government size second excessive turnover affects the allocative efficiency of government expenditures by skewing the composition of government spending toward pure consumption and away from more productive investment expenditures third the effect of turnover on fiscal policy is not linear public consumption expenditure is convex in turnover while public investment expenditure is concave in turnover

economic populism partial deregulation of transport fuels and electoral outcomes in india abstract the indian political class is known to employ populist albeit economically unsustainable measures to replace intrinsic valence especially shortly prior to election windows such measures include loan waivers interest rate concessions provision of free electricity for agriculturists etc the union government s leverage to maneuver and to micro manage retail fuel prices within partially deregulated environments is hypothesized to provide incumbents with an advantage over rival contestants in the electoral process this paper analyzes the evolution in the retail prices of diesel and petrol gasoline and the transfer of such evolution into the inflation index of the all commodity basket it is observed that when international benchmark prices are relatively low and domestic inflation is moderate the transfer occurs within about 42 weeks during periods of high oil prices frequently above usd 100 a barrel and high inflation higher than 5 00 5 50 prices of petroleum distillates tend to feed into overall inflation more rapidly within about 34 40 weeks the study covering a total of 82 elections for the central and state provincial governments during the period 2000 to 2013 concludes that even as patterns of manipulation of prices are apparent ceteris paribus such leverage does not necessarily seem to translate into favorable electoral outcomes this conclusion reiterates observations that economic im prudence may not necessarily determine electoral outcomes and that the basis for electoral choices made by the indian voter consumer remains subjective

consumption insurance an evaluation of risk bearing systems in low income economies the hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems in many contexts idiosyncratic risks are high so credit insurance arrangements could be beneficial statistical tests reveal that households in southern india take advantage of these possibilities villages in cote d ivoire and countries in thailand do not do as well the paper includes an empirical description of the devices used to smooth consumption and a theoretical discussion of private information and incentives on ideal operating systems the full information and mechanism design frameworks provide benchmarks for policy analysis

old voters new voters and the personal vote using redistricting to estimate the incumbency advantage we provide new estimates of the size of the personal vote in u s house elections from 1872 to 1990 we take advantage of the natural experiment that attends decennial redistricting every ten years most incumbents are given new districts that contain a combination of old and new territory by contrasting an incombent s vote in the new part of the district with his or her vote in the old part of the district we can estimate the magnitude of the personal vote the vote that the incumbent receives because he or she represented the voters in the past our estimates confirm prior work that shows that a large fraction of the incumbency advantage owes to the personal vote as opposed to challenger quality unlike past research we are able to estimate the relationship between district partisanship and the personal vote we find a significant interaction which shows that incumbents develop larger personal votes in areas where they are electorally most vulnerable here is no doubt that incumbents today have a substantial advantage over nonincumbents in u s house elections the overall size of this advantage has been fairly well established as has the fact that incumbents electoral strength has increased dramatically over the postwar period measured in terms of vote share the overall incumbency advantage grew from a modest 1 3 percentage point edge in the 1940s and early 1950s to a 7 10 percentage point edge in the 1980s and early 1990s 1 there is much less agreement about the sources of the incumbency advantage and the causes of its growth congressional scholars have identified a variety of factors that may be responsible which can be grouped into three broad categories the first and the focus of this paper is electoral advantage that stems from a legislator s homestyle members of the house are reputedly very responsive to their constituents in turn their constituents reward them with their votes mayhew 1974b fenno 1974 and others detail the sorts of activities that legislators do to build a widely known and respected name including casework frequent visits to the district position taking on issues and securing federal benefits a second source of the incumbency advantage is candidate quality incumbents may win because they are the best candidates running and they do noticeably worse when they face state legislators and other experienced challengers finally incumbency may simply act as a voting cue a label which voters rely on because party has become less relevant assessing the importance of these different factors has significant implications for our normative evaluations of the modern congress and our understanding

why did the incumbency advantage in u s house elections grow theory a simple rational entry argument suggests that the value of incumbency consists not just of a direct effect reflecting the value of resources such as staff attached to legislative office but also of an indirect effect reflecting the fact that stronger challengers are less likely to contest incumbent held seats the indirect effect is the product of a scare off effect the ability of incumbents to scare off high quality challengers and a quality effect reflecting how much electoral advantage a party accrues when it has an experienced rather than an inexperienced candidate hypothesis the growth of the overall incumbency advantage was driven principally by increases in the quality effect methods we use a simple two equation model estimated by ordinary least squares regression to analyze u s house election data from 1948 to 1990 results most of the increase in the incumbency advantage at least down to 1980 came through increases in the quality effect i e the advantage to the incumbent party of having a low quality challenger this suggests that the task for those wishing to explain the growth in the vote denominated incumbency advantage is to explain why the quality effect grew it also suggests that resource based explanations of the growth in the incumbency advantage cannot provide a full explanation

does price affect the demand for information about new health technologies evidence from a field experiment in nigeria we study how prices influence the demand for information about a new preventative health technology we conducted a field experiment in nigeria where women were offered the opportunity to get screened for cervical cancer at baseline 2 3 of women had no knowledge of cervical cancer screening field staff made house calls to give women information about the test and also distributed vouchers that randomly varied the price of screening at the point of service we find an inverse u shaped relationship between prices and the demand for information going from zero to a small positive price increased the demand for information about the test but increasing the price further by 100 resulted in a net decrease in the demand for information we argue that these results have interesting implications for the debate about the pricing of new health technologies in developing countries

electoral cycles in electricity losses in india abstract a third of electricity in india is lost each year where losses refer to power that is supplied but not billed utilizing data from the power corporation of uttar pradesh india s most populous state we study the politics of electricity losses examining annual data over four decades we document that up s electricity losses tend to increase in periods immediately prior to state assembly elections drawing upon geographically disaggregated data for the period 2000 09 we observe higher line losses just prior to the 2002 and 2007 state elections our analysis shows that the incumbent party was more likely to retain the assembly seat as line losses in the locality increased we interpret these results as corroboration that political parties deliberately redirect electricity to flat rate and unbilled users in a context of chronically inadequate supply political factors appear to affect line losses in ways that technical and economic factors alone cannot explain

the disadvantaged incumbents estimating incumbency effects in indian state legislatures this paper estimates the incumbency effects using a large dataset on state legislative elections in india during 1975 2003 i use a regression discontinuity design rdd that estimates the causal effect of incumbency by comparing candidates in closely fought elections i find that there is a significant disadvantage to incumbency in indian state legislative elections and the adverse effect of incumbency has increased after 1991 also the incumbency disadvantage is higher in states that have lower availability of public goods such as health centers and lower employment poverty and per capita income

explaining the oil advantage effects of natural resource wealth on incumbent reelection in iran why does natural resource wealth prolong incumbency using evidence from parliamentary elections in the islamic republic of iran the author shows that natural resource revenues boost incumbent reelection rates because they are used to provide public or private goods to constituents which incentivizes voters to reelect incumbents over challengers to test this hypothesis the author employs originally assembled data on five parliamentary elections in iran 1992 2008 in longitudinal hierarchical regression analyses at the district and province levels by leveraging iran s mixed member electoral system he shows that the resource incumbency mechanism works primarily in single member districts with little evidence of an incumbency advantage for politicians in resource rich multimember districts building on the rentier theory of natural resource wealth the results suggest that voting for the incumbent is attributable to patronage and public goods distribution the findings offer new insights into the understudied context of iranian legislative elections illustrate the mechanisms driving the relationship between resource wealth and incumbency advantage at the subnational level in a nondemocratic setting and highlight the mediating effects of electoral institutions on the resource incumbency relationship

estimating incumbency advantage without bias in this paper we prove theoretically and demonstrate empirically that all existing measures of incumbency advantage in the congressional elections literature are biased or inconsistent we then provide an unbiased estimator based on a very simple linear regression model we apply this new method to congressional elections since 1900 providing the first evidence of a positive incumbency advantage in the first half of the century incumbency advantage is the most frequently studied factor in the last 15 years of congressional elections research discovery of the increase in incum bency advantage has sparked controversy over its origins historical pattern cur rent magnitude and electoral democratic and policy consequences even the most basic descriptive information about incumbency advantage is flawed be cause every previous measure based on aggregate data in this literature is plagued by selection bias inconsistencies and inefficiencies we prove this result and also propose a new unbiased and statistically efficient measure that is very easy to calculate congressional elections from 1900 to the present fit our theoretical model our empirical reanalyses do not challenge the existing scholarly consen sus that incumbency advantage is much larger than it once was however we do challenge the prevailing belief that incumbency advantage was nonexistent and the evidence that it was negative in house elections during the first half of this century alford and brady 1988 we show instead that the average advantage of incumbency in these elections was about two percentage points in section 1 of this paper we define incumbency advantage and section 2 gives an intuitive sense of the problems identifying it even in ideal electoral sys tems section 3 formally proves that sophomore surge and retirement slump are biased estimates of incumbency advantage and section 4 briefly reveals the flaws

do voters affect or elect policies evidence from the u s house there are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation in one view voters can affect candidates policy choices competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center in this view elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise in the alternative view voters merely elect policies politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented we assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the u s house focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi experimental estimates of the impact of a randomized change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives roll call voting records we find that voters merely elect policies the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator s voting behavior for example a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties nominees to the left politicians inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition induced convergence in policy

political market characteristics and the provision of educational infrastructure in north india in this paper we are concerned with the provision of schools in rural north india particularly with whether such provision is determined by the demographic and economic characteristics of the region or whether local democracy also plays a role we find that the probability that a governing party loses an election has a positive effect on the provision of schooling infrastructure while the margin of victory of the governing party has a negative effect political reservation for members of the scheduled castes scs has a positive effect on schooling infrastructure in villages with a large sc population but a negative effect overall

service induced campaign contributions and the electoral equilibrium candidates for office are modeled as promising services such as support for legislation and intervention in the bureaucracy to interest groups in exchange for campaign contributions an electoral equilibrium is characterized in which candidates choose service contribution offers and interest groups choose whether to contribute the model provides several explanations of congressional incumbents success in over 90 percent of their reelection contests a recognition advantage a high personal valuation of the office a lower cost of providing services and policy alignment with high demand interest groups the model yields predictions that are consistent with empirical findings on the relation between campaign contributions and election outcomes

the runner up effect exploiting regression discontinuity designs in brazilian indian and canadian first past the post elections we document that second place candidates are substantially more likely than close third place candidates to run in and win subsequent elections since both candidates lost the election and had similar electoral performance this is the effect of being labeled the runner up selection into candidacy is unlikely to explain the effect on winning subsequent elections and we find no effect of finishing in third place versus fourth place we develop a simple model of strategic coordination by voters that rationalizes the results and provides further predictions that are supported by the data