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3 March 2006

Hainmueller and Lutz Kern on “Party Incumbency as a Source of Contamination in Mixed Electoral Systems�

Today, the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop sponsored a talk by Jens Hainmueller (Harvard – Department of Government) and Holger Lutz Kern (Cornell – Government) on “Party Incumbency as a Source of Contamination in Mixed Electoral Systems.� The paper examines propositions derived from the vast literature on incumbency advantage and the more recent research on “contamination� – which designates the interaction between the majoritarian and proportional components of mixed electoral systems – employing data from the elections of the German Bundestag. Hainmueller and Lutz Kern address the methodological problems faced by the “contamination� literature with an innovative Regression Discontinuity design. They show that - in marginal districts - party incumbency boosts a party’s nominal and list votes by about 1.5 percentage point. Simulations estimate that party incumbency effects lead to net shifts in Bundestag elections that range from 3 to 9 legislative seats.

Posted by Federico Ferrara at March 3, 2006 10:34 AM