Personal or partisan incumbency advantage? Evidence from an electoral reform in Italy

Marco Alberto De Benedetto
Additional contact information
Marco Alberto De Benedetto: University of Messina; Birkbeck, University of London

No 1903, Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance from Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics

Abstract: We analyze the incumbency advantage using a large data set on Italian municipal elections held from 1993 to 2011. We first apply a non-parametric Sharp Regression Discontinuity Design comparing parties that barely win an election to those that barely lose, exploiting the fact that partisan incumbency status changes discontinuously at the threshold of margin of victory of zero. In order to disentangle the personal incumbency advantage from the partisan effect, we rely on a reform that introduced mayoral term limit, and exploit the exogenous change on the incumbency status of mayors keeping the partisan incumbency status constant. We find that the incumbency advantage is essentially driven by the personal effect. The results are robust to different specifications and estimation strategies with excellent balance in observable characteristics. Also, the effect of interest seems to be larger in magnitude for municipalities located in the South of Italy compared to northern municipalities.

Keywords: Incumbency Status; Political Participation; Sharp RDD; Term Limit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 D8 K4 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/27398 First version, 2019

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bbk:bbkefp:1903

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance from Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).