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The Effect of Incumbency in the 1984 Federal and 1985 Ontario Elections*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Michael Krashinsky  and
William J. Milne
Michael Krashinsky
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
William J. Milne
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

This note extends the authors' earlier work on incumbency in Canadian federal and Ontario provincial elections by examining riding by riding results in the 1984 federal and 1985 Ontario provincial elections. In particular, the authors test their earlier hypothesis that incumbency effects are swamped by large shifts in voter preferences. The results indicate that incumbency had a significant impact, and that this impact was not reduced by the large shift in votes in the 1984 federal election. The authors reject the hypothesis that large shifts in party allegiance reduce incumbency effects.

Résumé

Cette note élargit la portée d'une étude effectuée précédemment par les mêmes auteurs sur l'avantage électoral dont bénéficie l'élu, en examinant circonscription par circonscription les résultats des élections fédérales de 1984 et provinciales ontariennes de 1985. Ainsi les auteurs mettent-ils à l'épreuve leur hypothèse selon laquelle l'avantage dont bénéficie l'élu disparaîtrait devant de fortes oscillations dans la loyauté que ressent l'électeur pour un parti particulier. Les résultats indiquent que cet avantage a eu un impact significatif, et que cet impact n'a pas été affaibli par le grand renversement des votes lors de l'élection fédérate en 1984. Les auteurs rejettent l'hypothèse selon laquelle de fortes oscillations dans la loyauteé ressentie par l'individu envers le parti tendraient à réduire l'avantage dont bénéficie l'élu.

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1986 , pp. 337 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1986

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References

1 For eight election pairs studied between 1953 and 1980, the effect of incumbency averaged 3.40 percentage points for the Liberals, 3.45 percentage points for the Conservatives, and 4.27 percentage points for the NDP. The average effect for the Social Credit party was in excess of 10 percentage points, but this is largely due to elections in which the party was in the process of disappearing from the federal scene.

2 See Krashinsky, Michael and Milne, William J., “Some Evidence on the Effect of Incumbency in Ontario Provincial Elections”, this JOURNAL 16 (1983), 489–500Google Scholar, and Additional Evidence on the Effect of Incumbency in Canadian Elections”, this JOURNAL 18 (1985), 155–65.Google Scholar The explanation advanced in the second work for the somewhat smaller effect of incumbency was that “when voters are rejecting a government, incumbents have no special advantage: government incumbents are part of the government being rejected, while opposition incumbents do not have the ‘advantage’ of running against incumbents which voters wish to have replaced” (165).

3 The gain by the Conservatives in 1984 is the largest in recent history. The Diefenbaker Conservatives picked up many votes in the late 1950s, but the gain (and the Liberal loss) was divided overtwo elections (1957 and 1958), though the 1958 gain of just over

4 per cent was comparable to 1984. Similarly, the collapse by the Liberals is matched only by the Conservative loss of over 16 percentage points in 1962 (and it is 1962 which generated an insignificant effect for incumbency for the Conservatives), although the votes lost were split among the three opposition parties.

5 See, for example, Martin, P., “Incumbency Looms as a Major Factor in Ontario Election”, The Globe and Mail, April 20, 1985.Google Scholar

6 Although the 7.4 percentage point loss for the Conservatives is larger for that party than the shift in votes in the other three election pairs we studied (1967-1971,1975-1977, and 1977-1981), it is comparable with the 6.9 percentage point loss by the NDP in 1981. The 4.2 percentage point gain for the Liberals compares with their 3.9 percentage point loss in 1971, and of course the 2.7 percentage point gain by the NDP is hardly dramatic.

7 Also the corrected R2 for the two major parties is very high for a cross-sectional study. It should not be inferred that other effects are unimportant and that only incumbency stands up to the shift in votes. The R2 is high because the variation in the dependent variable is much larger than before (the sum of squares for the dependent variable is about 19 for each party, with the equivalent statistic in the previous three elections ranging between 2.1 and 4.8),.rather than because the “unexplained” portion has declined (the sum of squared error terms in fact is slightly larger).

8 The Liberal result of .052 exceeds any of the incumbency coefficients in the 10 earlier elections studied in the 1985 note, while the Conservative result of .047 exceeds the coefficients in 8 of these 10 elections. The NDP result of .074 is larger than 7 of the 8 earlier results.

9 In this note, the term statistically significant means that the null hypothesis (generally that the coefficient is zero) is rejected at the .05 level.

10 This was in response in part to polls in the months prior to the election which suggested that the NDP was about to lose large numbers of voters and risked demise as an effective force in federal politics.

11 The Maritimes were omitted to avoid over-specification.

12 In all three cases, the new result is within one standard error of the average in the previous three elections measured in the earlier study.

13 The most dramatic issue—funding for separate schools—was never addressed in the campaign.

14 The F values were 5.880 for the Liberals, 0.475 for the Conservatives, and 0.098 for the NDP (1 restriction, 200 degrees of freedom). See Maddala, G. S., Econometrics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 198.Google Scholar The unrestricted federal and provincial coefficients on incumbency were .033 and .103 for the Liberals, .063 and .078 for the Conservatives, and .084 and .095 for the NDP. The federal coefficients differ from those reported in Table I because the data are limited to Ontario ridings. The provincial coefficients differ from those reported in Table 2 because the equation used omits any regional variables.