Working Paper
Incumbency Disadvantage in U.S. National Politics: The Role of Policy Inertia and Prospective Voting
Abstract: We document that postwar U.S. national elections show a strong pattern of incumbency disadvantage\": If the presidency has been held by a party for some time, that party tends to lose seats in Congress. We develop a model of partisan politics with policy inertia and prospective voting to explain this finding. Positive and normative implications of the model are explored.
Keywords: rational partisan model; incumbency disadvantage; policy inertia; prospective voting; median voter;
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Bibliographic Information
Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Part of Series: Working Papers
Publication Date: 2017-12-21
Number: 17-43
Pages: 52 pages