The Informational Value of Incumbency

Humberto Llavador and Carmen Bevia ()

No 276, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: This paper proposes an argument that explains incumbency advantage without recurring to the collective irresponsibility of legislatures. For that purpose, we exploit the informational value of incumbency: incumbency confers voters information about governing politicians not available from challengers. Because there are many reasons for high reelection rates different from incumbency status, we propose a measure of incumbency advantage that improves the use of pure reelection success. We also study the relationship between incumbency advantage and ideological and selection biases. An important implication of our analysis is that the literature linking incumbency and legislature irresponsibility most likely provides an overestimation of the latter.

Keywords: information; incumbency; candidate quality; selection bias; ideology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Informational Value of Incumbency (2009)
Working Paper: The Informational Value of Incumbency (2006)
Working Paper: The informational value of incumbency (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:276

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