Incumbency Disadvantage in U.S. National Politics: The Role of Policy Inertia and Prospective Voting

Satyajit Chatterjee () and Burcu Eyigungor

No 17-43, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: We document that postwar U.S. national elections show a strong pattern of incumbency disadvantage\": If the presidency has been held by a party for some time, that party tends to lose seats in Congress. We develop a model of partisan politics with policy inertia and prospective voting to explain this finding. Positive and normative implications of the model are explored.

Keywords: rational partisan model; incumbency disadvantage; policy inertia; prospective voting; median voter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 H50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2017-12-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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