#  Danny Ebanks (Applied Stats) 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 9, 2024** 

 12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS Knafel room K354, or virtual via Zoom**  



 

 



 

##  Today's Speaker

 Danny Ebanks (Harvard), "The Unimportance of Incumbency Advantage and Ideological Polarization in House Elections"

##  Abstract

 An essential component of democracy is the ability to hold legislators accountable via the threat of electoral defeat, a concept that has rarely been quantified directly. Well-known massive changes over time in indirect measures — such as incumbency advantage, electoral margins, partisan bias, partisan advantage, split-ticket voting, and others — all seem to imply wide swings in electoral competitiveness. In contrast, we show that the (precisely calibrated) probability of defeating incumbent US House members has been surprisingly constant and remarkably high for two-thirds of a century. We resolve this paradox with a generative statistical model of the full vote distribution to avoid biases induced by the common practice of studying only central tendencies, and validate it with extensive out-of-sample tests. We show that different states of the partisan battlefield lead in interestingly different ways to the same high probability of incumbent defeat. Many challenges to American democracy remain, but this core feature remains durable.

 *The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers.  
  
All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.*



 

 



 

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