Abstract
The last four election-cycles in the U.S. House of Representatives (2004–2010) witnessed two shifts in political party control of that legislative body—from the Republicans to the Democrats in 2006 and then back to the Republicans in 2010. Nevertheless, U.S. House incumbents of both parties running for re-election tended to enjoy a sizeable advantage over their general-election challengers during the period. The advantage is even greater for incumbents who are members of the leadership, key committees, or have lengthy tenure. Our results show that, ceteris paribus, membership in the House leadership is worth on average 6.8 percentage points towards the incumbent’s expected vote-share, and that membership in either of the two top committees is worth an additional 1.3 such percentage points. A ten-term incumbent can expect another 2.0 percentage points of vote share. Lastly, our results also indicate the existence of a wave effect favoring Democratic incumbents in 2006, and a slightly smaller wave effect favoring Republican incumbents in 2010.
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Notes
Mayhew (1974) found that the mail-flow curve in the United States House of Representatives closely tracked the incumbency advantage curve. In terms of redistricting, results in Mixon and Upadhyaya (1997) suggest that the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reduced turnover in the U.S. House of Representatives by 10.3 percentage points (for 1988) in states that created minority-majority districts. However, empirical work examining the impact of redistricting efforts is mixed, given the empirical evidence in Friedman and Holden (2009), which indicates that, ceteris paribus, changes in redistricting have reduced the probability of incumbent re-election in the modern era. Some of the incongruence here could be due to differences in the types of redistricting, and/or whether the redistricting is accomplished by legislators or commissions, boards or other less-partisan bodies (Cottrill 2012).
Lott (2009) found that the choice of voting technologies made by politicians affects the incidence of ballot fatigue, a process wherein voters fail to participate in down-ballot elections, and that such fatigue rates differ by the race of the voter. Mixon and King (2002) extended Lott’s findings by showing that political support for federal legislation providing funds to integrate newer voting technologies depended on the racial composition of the electorate.
Kimenyi and Tollison (1995) argued that the amount of government spending will be larger in bills that are long and complex (e.g., omnibus appropriations), and that complex legislation will emerge from longer sessions.
Legislative television did not emerge in the U.S. Congress until the 1980s.
The longest-tenured U.S. House incumbent during that period was Representative John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, who sought (and won) re-election to a 29th term in 2010.
Formidable, but not impossibly so: of 212 U.S. House incumbents who ran for re-election between 2004 and 2010 after 11 or more terms of service, 12 were defeated.
In 2004, Representative Bernard Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, was re-elected to an eighth term. Two years later, Representative Sanders won election to the state’s U.S. Senate seat vacated by the retirement of James Jeffords (who, like Sanders, was also an Independent who caucused with the Democrats).
The second of these studies finds that a candidate’s probability of winning an open-seat election to the U.S. House rises by 0.243 (0.130) if one’s campaign spending advantage rises from $0.5 million ($0.25 million) to $1 million ($0.5 million).
Fair (2007) examined macro-data on Democratic Party returns. This methodology employs a small time series (n = 23).
The variable did not include incumbents whose challengers had previously been appointed to office but had not held elective office. From a candidate-quality standpoint, there is a difference between having been appointed to office and having been elected to office on one’s own.
Following equation (1), the test statistic is, \( t=\frac{{\left( {{{\widehat{\beta}}_2}-{{\widehat{\beta}}_3}} \right)}}{{\sqrt{{\operatorname{var}\left( {{{\widehat{\beta}}_2}} \right)+\operatorname{var}\left( {{{\widehat{\beta}}_3}} \right)-2\operatorname{cov}\left( {{{\widehat{\beta}}_2},{{\widehat{\beta}}_3}} \right)}}}} \) (see Gujurati 1988). Other tests of the equality of parameters that appear later in this study follow a similar construct.
As noted earlier, membership in the party leadership improves an incumbent’s vote share by 6.8 percentage points. However, in this case the difference between the absolute values of the parameter estimates, 0.9 percentage points, is not statistically significant.
The 2010 elections saw a Republican net gain of 63 U.S. House seats; Democrats gained 31 U.S. House seats as a result of the 2006 elections.
As measured by the GDP implicit price deflator, the aggregate price level rose 8.1 % from 2006Q1 to 2010Q1.
Another 11 U.S. House incumbents seeking re-election between 2004 and 2010 were defeated in primary contests: 1 in 2004, 2 in 2006, and 4 each in 2008 and 2010.
In the 2010 elections, Republicans won 66 seats that had been occupied by Democrats, while Democrats won 3 seats that had been occupied by Republicans. Another 25 seats, with 19 new Republicans and 6 new Democrats, did not change political parties.
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Duquette, C.M., Mixon, F.G. & Cebula, R.J. The Impact of Legislative Tenure and Seniority on General Election Success: Econometric Evidence from U.S. House Races. Atl Econ J 41, 161–172 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-012-9355-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-012-9355-x