Political Careers in Brazil: the effect of winning vs. being the runner-up

Leandro De Magalhães, Thomas M. F. Gemignani and Salomo Hirvonen

Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Political careers often include transitions between elected offices. Using complete electoral data for Brazil (1998-2014), we document office-to-office transitions and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the advantage of winning office, both when re-running for the same office (incumbency advantage), and when contending for other offices as well (career advantage). We find a clear ranking. Winning a seat in the federal or state legislatures gives an incumbency advantage. Becoming a mayor gives no incumbency advantage. The career advantage is smaller across these three offices as runners-up outperform winners in other offices. For municipal councilors, results are reversed: an incumbency disadvantage, and a small but positive effect of winners outperforming runners-up in other offices. With an heterogeneity analysis, we show that sub-samples of candidates with no experience, less educated, with a lower share of the vote, and running in smaller municipalities explain the incumbency disadvantage for local councilors.

Date: 2025-04-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/efm/media/workingpapers/w ... pdffiles/dp25803.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:bri:uobdis:25/803

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by School of Economics Research Support Team ().