Climbing the ranks: incumbency effects in party-list systems

Fiva, Jon H.; Røhr, Helene Lie

doi:10.1016/j.euroecorev.2017.09.011

Cited by 49 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This means that candidates who just miss out on a council seat become their party's first deputy councilor. This person will substitute for indisposed regular councilors from their own party at local council meetings (Fiva and Røhr 2018). seats have been allocated.…”

Section: National Election Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Seniority-Based Nominations and Political Careers

2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper investigates party use of seniority systems to allocate nominations for elected and appointed offices. Such systems, which can regulate party members’ access to offices at multiple levels of their careers, are defined by two main rules or norms: an incumbent re-nomination norm and a seniority progression norm. Using comprehensive electoral and candidate data from Norwegian local and national elections from 1945 to 2019, we find systematic patterns consistent with these two norms. Our work illuminates an institutional aspect of candidate selection that the current literature has ignored while noting some of the important consequences of seniority-based nominations for party cohesion and stability.

show abstract

Section: National Election Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Seniority-Based Nominations and Political Careers

2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…She argues that this might be caused by “party gatekeeper's [(un)]willingness to place women candidates in winnable seats or positions.” This assumption is not unwarranted, as previous research has shown that list placement is a particularly important factor for electoral success, even in open-list PR systems (Jankowski and Marcinkiewicz 2019). Even more importantly to support this argument, Fiva and Rohr (2018) find a strong effect of incumbency on future list placement in party-centered systems.…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 94%

The Effect of Electing Women on Future Female Candidate Selection Patterns: Findings from a Regression Discontinuity Design

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we address the question of how electing women to national or subnational parliaments affects future female candidate selection in an open-list proportional representation system, using the example of Poland. We consider three potential effects of electing a woman. First, based on existing theories of the incumbency advantage, elected women should have higher chances of reselection and reelection in future elections (incumbency effect). Second, as a result of becoming more powerful within their party, elected women might have a stronger influence on future list composition, and thus more women should run for office on these lists (empowerment effect). Finally, we argue that other parties might adjust their candidate selection patterns in response to the election of women on other party lists (contagion effect). We find strong evidence for the incumbency effect and some support for the contagion effect. The empowerment hypothesis, however, finds no empirical support.

show abstract

“…Some studies have detected an incumbency effect on personal vote shares for the subset of senior candidates who have previously been elected to the parliament under proportional representation (Dahlgaard, 2016;Kotakorpi et al, 2017;Moral et al, 2015;Redmond and Regan, 2015). Other studies find no such incumbency effect (Fiva and Røhr, 2018;Golden and Picci, 2015), but there are also other potential costs associated with choosing not to renominate senior candidates such as intraparty controversy. Consistent with this possibility, Golden and Picci find that despite the lack of an incumbency effect on personal vote shares, party leaders nonetheless renominate incumbents disproportionately.…”

Section: Party Leaders and Candidate Nomination Rulesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Candidate nomination rules and party leader strategies

Tromborg

2019

Party Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Parliamentary party leaders have an electoral incentive to protect the informational value of their party's label by promoting unity, but recent research has shown that parties can also benefit electorally from appealing broadly through a wide distribution of candidate positions on political issues. This article suggests that party leaders with formal candidate nomination powers balance these incentives by nominating new candidates who are more congruent with the party when the distribution of issue positions among the senior candidates is wide, and, conversely, by nominating new candidates who are more divergent from the party when the senior candidate position distribution is narrow. These possibilities are tested with candidate survey data from six parliamentary democracies, and the results show that new party leader nominations are indeed conditional on the senior candidate distribution, but only on issues that are salient to the party’s electoral brand.

show abstract

Climbing the ranks: incumbency effects in party-list systems

Cited by 49 publications

References 33 publications

Seniority-Based Nominations and Political Careers

Seniority-Based Nominations and Political Careers

The Effect of Electing Women on Future Female Candidate Selection Patterns: Findings from a Regression Discontinuity Design

Candidate nomination rules and party leader strategies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About