Last Minute Policies and the Incumbency Advantage
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Abstract
This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, an incumbent and a possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent’s statement may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. We find that, since the incumbent’s positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent’s incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in his quality, as previously documented by the empirical literature. The distortions arising in equilibrium are decreasing in the incumbent’s true competence; however, the distortions may be increasing in the incumbent’s expected competence on his signature issue.
© 2019 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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- Last Minute Policies and the Incumbency Advantage
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Articles in the same Issue
- Issue Information
- Fighting Terrorism: Empirics on Policy Harmonisation
- Sovereign Reputation and Yield Spreads: A Case Study on Retroactive Legislation
- Last Minute Policies and the Incumbency Advantage
- Benford and the Internal Capital Market: A Useful Indicator of Managerial Engagement
- Banks’ Interest Rate Risk and Search for Yield: A Theoretical Rationale and Some Empirical Evidence
- Means-Tested Long-Term Care and Family Transfers
