Incumbency Effects in Germany: Federal and Mayoral Elections

Philip Sieger

VfS Annual Conference 2012 (Goettingen): New Approaches and Challenges for the Labor Market of the 21st Century from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: In this paper incumbency effects in Federal Elections and Mayoral Elections in Germany are estimated using a quasi-experimental design which allows for causal inference under a set of rather mild assumptions. Relying on nonparametric and parametric estimation procedures and exploiting a recently developed bandwidth selection criteria, incumbency effects for the two major parties in Germany cause an increase in vote share of 1.4%-1.7% in Federal Elections. Analyzing Mayoral Elections, the causal effect of incumbency is about ten times larger with an increase in vote share of 14%-17%. Both results are robust with respect to the inclusion of further covariates. These huge differences might possibly be explained by the differences in visibility and popularity of mayors compared to candidates in Federal Elections.

JEL-codes: C14 C21 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/62084/1/VfS_2012_pid_733.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:vfsc12:62084

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2012 (Goettingen): New Approaches and Challenges for the Labor Market of the 21st Century from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().