Closest to the People? Incumbency Advantage and the Personal Vote in Non-Partisan Elections

• Author: Kim-Lee Tuxhorn,Jack Lucas,R. Michael McGregor
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912921990751
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 75(1) 188 –202

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912921990751

Political Research Quarterly

© 2021 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912921990751

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Introduction

Few electoral arenas are more favorable to incumbents

than non-partisan cities. Re-election rates among

incumbent candidates in these contests regularly exceed

ninety percent, and elections in which every incumbent

candidate is successfully re-elected are so common as

to merit little more than passing mention in post-elec-

tion news coverage. For some, these success rates are a

sign of serious trouble, an indication that non-partisan

incumbents have little incentive to attend to their con-

stituents’ preferences (Bednar 2014). Others suggest

that the opposite is true: incumbent success reflects the

fact that non-partisan city politicians are “closest to the

people,” free from party discipline and distant travel

and able to focus on the concrete interests and needs of

their constituents (Oliver 2012).

The size of the “personal vote”—the relationship and

reputation that incumbents cultivate with their constitu-

ents—thus has important implications for our under-

standing of incumbent success in non-partisan elections.

If incumbents in these elections enjoy a substantial per-

sonal vote, this may indicate that local incumbent success

rates are indeed a reflection of a distinctively close con-

nection that non-partisan politicians enjoy with their con-

stituents. By contrast, if incumbent success in non-partisan

elections is driven by other factors, such as instantaneous

incumbency cues or challenger scare-off, the case for

non-partisanship as a means to improved democratic rep-

resentation is more tenuous. Providing evidence with

which to adjudicate among these possibilities is espe-

cially important in an era in which non-partisan city poli-

tics is held up as a positive example of non-polarized,

pragmatic, democratic policymaking (Barber 2013).

In this paper, we combine individual survey data with

quasi-random assignment to old or new incumbent candi-

dates to provide a more precise and robust assessment of

the size and persistence of the personal vote than has been

possible in previous aggregate-level research. We use

three original data sources to identify the size, persis-

tence, and electoral consequences of the personal vote in

Calgary, Alberta, the eighth-largest non-partisan city in

North America. We first leverage a natural experiment

created by a 2017 ward boundary revision process, in

combination with novel individual-level survey data, to

show that the probability of voting for an incumbent

990751

PRQXXX10.1177/1065912921990751Political Research QuarterlyLucas et al.

research-article2021

1University of Calgary, AB, Canada

2Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Jack Lucas, Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary, 618 Campus Place

N.W., Calgary T2N 1N4, AB, Canada.

Email: Jack.lucas@ucalgary.ca

Closest to the People? Incumbency

Advantage and the Personal Vote

in Non-Partisan Elections

Jack Lucas1, R. Michael McGregor2, and Kim-Lee Tuxhorn1

Abstract

Do incumbents dominate non-partisan elections because of an especially large personal vote? This question has

important implications for understanding the causes of incumbent success and the benefits or drawbacks of non-

partisan elections. This paper uses a natural experiment, combined with three original datasets, to estimate the size,

persistence, and consequences of the personal vote in a large non-partisan city election. We first use individual-

level survey data to show that individuals assigned quasi-randomly to a new incumbent are substantially less likely

to support the incumbent. We use a second survey, one year later, to demonstrate the persistence of this effect.

Finally, we use historical election results to simulate the electoral consequences of the personal vote; we find that the

personal vote is sufficiently large to affect one in four incumbent races. We conclude that the personal vote, while

large and important, is not sufficient to explain incumbent dominance in non-partisan contests.

Keywords

incumbency advantage, personal vote, municipal elections, non-partisan elections, municipal politics, natural experiment

Article