Incumbency (Dis)Advantage When Citizens Can Propose

Abstract

This paper analyses the problem that an incumbent faces during the legislature when deciding how to react to citizen proposals such as the outcome of referenda or popular initiatives. We argue that these proposals constitute a potential source of electoral disadvantage when citizens factor in their evaluation of the incumbent his reaction to these proposals. This is because an incumbent politician may jeopardize his re-election by implementing policies close to his preferred ones but unpopular among the electorate. We characterize conditions under which this potential disadvantage becomes in fact an electoral advantage for the incumbent. We fi nd that the choices of the incumbent during the legislature will be closest to citizens policy proposals when the intensity of electoral competition is neither too soft nor too tough. Finally, we use our results to discuss some implications of the use of mechanisms such as referenda and popular assemblies on electoral competition and on the incumbency advantage phenomenon. Acknowledgements: 1A previous version of this paper circulated under the title "The disadvantage of winning an election". The present version supersedes that one. Aragonès acknowledges nancial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, grant number ECO2009-08820, the Catalan Government, grant number 2009 SGR 1126, and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. We would like to thank Miguel Angel Ballester, Micael Castanheira, Luca Merlino, Maggie Penn, Clara Ponsatí, Norman Scho eld, Jim Snyder, Joel Sobel, participants at the rst APE-X meeting in Brussels, the MOVE conference in Barcelona and the IAE s informal seminar for their useful comments.

Preventing leaders' autocratic entrenchment by exponential super-majority threshold escalators

“…Incumbents often build themselves a self-image of being a safer bet than challengers (Bernhardt and Ingberman, 1985) and they mostly enjoy positive free media exposure of their actions, speaking and writing vs. challengers who must buy and organize exposure of their own actions (Caselli et al, 2014). Incumbents raise funds more easily and have better access to other campaign resources (Cox and Katz, 1996;Jacobson, 2006;Cole et al, 2016;Bohn, 2019); they can use "Pork Barrel" politics, favoring specific categories of supporters (Ansolabehere et al, 2006;DeBacker, 2011); they can better conceal irresponsible deeds/decisions as state secrets and convince voters of their morality and credibility by referring to their seniority and past successes while using advantageous knowledge due to their access to classified information (Fiorina, 1989;McKelvey and Riezman, 1992;Cox and Katz, 1996;Druckman et al, 2020); they advance their own policies while deterring/barring challengers' alternatives (Aragones and Santiago, 2016); their successes or assumed ones enhance their image of having superior personal qualities, which deters strong talented challengers from competing with them (Levitt and Wolfram, 1997;Stone et al, 2004), and thus face weaker challengers than those faced in the competition for open offices (Gowrisankaran et al, 2008;Jalali, 2012).…”