My book manuscript, Incumbency Bias, is the first comparative study of an old but unresolved question about democratic accountability: Why do incumbent politicians enjoy an electoral advantage over their challengers in some democracies but suffer from an electoral disadvantage in other democracies?
Common explanations argue that incumbency effects emerge because of rampant elite malfeasance: incumbents use office to either extract personal rents and get systematically ousted or to politically target public resources and systematically win elections. Theories centered on elites thus imply that incumbency advantage and disadvantage are a bad equilibrium in which voters cannot use the ballot to select good representatives.
Shifting attention from elites to voters, I advanced an informational theory that suggests that incumbency effects emerge when political institutions lead citizens to vote on performance and vary as a function of shocks. When political institutions encourage voters to use performance in office as a heuristic, voters both extract valuable information about candidate quality and are swayed by exogenous shocks beyond incumbent control– such as changes in fiscal transfers and commodity prices. This incumbency bias may be advantageous or disadvantageous for incumbents depending on the nature of the shock.
To test the theory, I draw evidence from Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and take advantage of natural experiments based on administrative data, original survey experiments, and elite interviews. I examine the external validity analysing incumbency effects in Latin American presidential elections.
