6 - Incumbency and moderation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The primary focus of this book is on partisan politics where voters are concerned with policies that can be positioned on a liberal–conservative dimension. An alternative view of American politics is that voters are concerned with how a larger share of the federal pie can be garnered for their state, their congressional district, and, ultimately, themselves. These distributive concerns, coupled with the seniority system in Congress, provide voters with strong incentives to re-elect incumbents. In addition, incumbents, in part through use of the perquisites of office, have strong informational advantages over challengers. As a consequence, “incumbency advantage” is a major determinant of congressional elections. The “incumbency advantage” is particularly evident in the House in the postwar period where, until the wave of retirements in 1992, over 90 percent of incumbents stood for re-election and, of those standing, over 90 percent were reappointed. These high rates of re-election have led recent elections to produce, especially relative to earlier periods of American history, small changes in seat shares.

Thus far this book has ignored incumbency advantage. Instead, we have emphasized the balancing behavior of voters, which generates split-ticket voting and the midterm cycle. In this chapter we discuss how incumbency advantage and balancing behavior coexist.

The model of chapter 4 predicts substantial changes in vote shares as a result of the midterm cycle. While the theoretical prediction of a shift in votes receives overwhelming empirical support (figure 4.1), the shift in thevote has not had much impact on seats. Finding a midterm cycle that is far stronger in votes than in seats raises an important question.