To date, most scholarly works have focused on incumbency advantage in the US and consider how it operates in majoritarian contexts. In a recent paper, Mert Moral, H. Ege Ozen and Efe Tokdemir drew on the case of Turkey to explore whether the incumbency operates in multi member district systems. They found that although it is not as marked as in the US context, considerable incumbency advantage persisted in the more proportional system

Moral, Mert

Ozen, H. Ege

Tokdemir, Efe

LSE Research Online

By Democratic Audit UK 2016-3-3Incumbency advantage is not restricted to establishedmajoritarian systemsdemocraticaudit.com /2016/03/03/incumbency-advantage-is-not-restricted-to-established-majoritarian-systems/To date, most scholarly works have focused on incumbency advantage in the US and consider how it operates inmajoritarian contexts. In a recent paper, Mert Moral, H. Ege Ozen and Efe Tokdemir drew on the case of Turkey toexplore whether the incumbency operates in multi member district systems. They found that although it is not asmarked as in the US context, considerable incumbency advantage persisted in the more proportional system.Credit: Aris Gionis CC BY-NC 2.0Incumbency advantage is an empirical regularity, which can briefly be described as the frequent re-election ofincumbent members of legislatures. The literature on incumbency advantage, which originates from observations ofincumbent members of the Congress and mostly built on the dynamics of American Politics, suggests a number oftheoretical explanations for such regularity. Incumbents are found to discourage high quality challengers fromrunning in elections, and have higher name recognition and larger resources due to their stronger local ties.Incumbency also works as a heuristic cue to voters, which largely decreases information costs associated withvoting.To date, most scholarly works have focused on incumbency advantage in the US and explore how the singlemember district (SMD) electoral system creates incentives for individual candidates to develop close personalrelationships with their constituencies, which eventually lead to high levels of name recognition and therefore tosafer electoral races for candidates running in the same district from one election to the next.Recently, we published an article in Electoral Studies where we asked whether the incumbency advantage is aphenomenon unique to SMD systems. If this is not the case, then under which conditions or institutionalarrangements would political parties and individual candidates enjoy the benefits of incumbency? Does a similarpattern exist in multi member district (MMD) systems, particularly in closed-list PR systems where party control onthe nomination of candidates is arguably higher? We used Turkey as an MMD example revealing the characteristicsof both stable and unstable party systems to assess the extent of incumbency advantage conditional on varyinglevels of district magnitude and party system instability.1/3Incumbency advantage is not unique to majoritarian systemsIn the article, we argue that incumbency advantage is not peculiar to SMD systems. Rather, it is a phenomenonwhich is applicable to other electoral systems, even those where voters base their evaluations on party lists. In otherwords, we suggest that political parties can gain additional electoral benefits by strategically fielding incumbentcandidates.One of the circumstances that motivates political parties to field incumbent candidates is district magnitude, which isoften considered as the primary factor leading to high levels of incumbency advantage in SMD. The main sourceof scepticism against an incumbency advantage in MMD systems is the higher cost of information that voters needto possess due to higher numbers of individual candidates running in distinct party lists in each electoral district.That said, in most MMD systems, the number of candidates is proportional to the size (i.e., demography) of electoraldistricts. An incumbent candidate, in the conventional definition of incumbency, in smaller district is more likely toenjoy an incumbency advantage.  Due to the benefits of higher name recognition, we also hypothesise thatreputable incumbents transferred from other districts or other parties are likely to be fielded by political parties inlarger districts especially in turbulent times where the cost of information to voters is higher.The second condition that we underline in our study relates to party system instability. In unstable party systems, itis not political parties but political elites who have a more prominent role in politics, which makes parties fieldindividuals more familiar to voters. In our article we therefore hypothesise that political parties receive electoral gainsfrom fielding incumbents transferred from other parties or districts when the level of party-system instability is high.The case of TurkeyIn order to test our theoretical expectations we employed an original dataset on incumbent and non-incumbentparliamentarians in Turkey, where the closed-list PR makes incumbency advantages even less likely to be observedand hence provides more conservative tests for our hypotheses. Moreover, varying district magnitudes acrosselectoral districts in Turkey enable us to look at how individual and party incentives differ across smaller and largerdistricts. We limit our analysis to the period after the military coup in 1980, to the seven parliamentary electionsbetween 1987 and 2011.Turkey is also a good case for studying the effects of party-system stability, as the elections in 1987 and 2002indicated a distinct pattern compared to the other five elections we examined. Clientelistic relationships betweencandidates/parties and their constituencies, as well as the electoral rules in Turkey, have otherwise followed a quitestable trajectory between 1987 and 2011. However, political shocks, namely the military coup and the 2001economic crisis, affected the electoral outcomes in the 1987 and 2002 elections. We therefore divided our sampleinto two, and analysed the 1987 and 2002 general elections separately from other elections.Strategies adopted in the context of party-system instabilityOur empirical analyses reveal that party system instability in the Turkish context made political parties adoptdifferent strategies compared to parties in more established and institutionalised party systems. To start with theinteractive models in the article, incumbency advantage, in its conventional definition, decreases when district sizeincreases. However, our findings also confirm an inverse relationship between the incumbency advantage anddistrict magnitude in MMD systems when alternative party strategies are taken into account.Figure 1 below shows the marginal effect of two different measures of incumbency that we account for. Whileincumbents running from same parties in same districts create an advantage that varies between 2.8 and 1.3percentage points in smaller districts, political parties also benefit from transferring well-recognised incumbents andmake them run in larger districts to decrease the cost of information to voters and benefit from their namerecognition. In larger districts, the electoral gains of parties from fielding incumbent candidates vary between 1.5 and11.6 percentage points conditional on district magnitude.2/3While we found a small incumbency advantage in non-interactive models, our most important findings is that inter-and intraparty transfers were mainly used to enable parties to enjoy a relatively high level of incumbency advantagein 1987 and 2002 elections, which were stigmatised with high levels of party system instability. Accordingly, we canconfirm that political parties receive electoral gains from fielding incumbent candidates that they transfer from otherparties or from other districts when the party-system instability is high.ConclusionOur study shows a considerable incumbency advantage in Turkey, albeit lower than estimated levels in studiesfocusing on the US. Incumbency advantage is higher in districts with smaller magnitudes that resemble the SMDsystems, but such effect is also conditional on other factors affecting voter behavior such as party entry and exit.Moreover, intra and inter-party transfers of incumbent candidates benefit political parties in turbulent times. In theserespects, we believe that further research on incumbency advantage in PR should take into account theconditionality on party system stability and electoral institutions.__This post represents the views of the authors and not those of Democratic Audit UK or the LSE. Please read ourcomments policy before posting.__Mert Moral is PhD Candidate in Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY). His researchinterests include political polarization, voting behavior, voter turnout, electoral institutions,representation, political methodology, and Turkish politics. His research has been published or isforthcoming in International Political Science Review, Electoral Studies, and International Journal ofElectronic Governance.Ege Ozen is from Turkey, where he received his BA degree in political science and sociology andhis MA degree in history and political science. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in politicalscience at Binghamton University (SUNY) specialized in comparative politics. His research interestsare on voting behavior, domestic politics of the Middle Eastern and North African countries, electionsand electoral processes, political parties, and representation. His Ph.D. dissertation is on votingbehavior in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey.Efe Tokdemir is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY), NewYork. He is currently a visiting scholar at Mershon Center for International Security Studies at theOhio State University. Tokdemir is specializing in International Relations with a focus on foreignpolicy and foreign public opinion, and terrorism. He has forthcoming and published articles inJournal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace Science, International PoliticalScience Review, and Electoral Studies. To learn more about his research please visitwww.efetokdemir.com 3/3

Incumbency advantage is not restricted to established majoritarian systems

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