Incumbency Effects under Proportional Representation: Leaders and Backbenchers in the Postwar Italian Chamber of Deputies

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12087
• Published date: 01 November 2015
• Author: Miriam A. Golden,Lucio Picci
• Date: 01 November 2015

MIRIAM A. GOLDEN

University of California at Los Angeles

LUCIO PICCI

University of Bologna

Incumbency Effects under

Proportional Representation:

Leaders and Backbenchers

in the Postwar Italian Chamber

of Deputies

We study incumbency effects for individual legislators from two political parties

(Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party) in Italy’s lower house of represen-

tatives over 10 legislatures (1948–92) elected using open-list proportional

representation. Our analysis finds no reelection advantage for the average incumbent

legislator. Only a tiny elite in each party successfully creates an incumbency advantage.

We find incumbents advantaged for reselection by their political party. We interpret

reselection advantage as a party loyalty premium. Our study depicts a political environ-

ment monopolized by party leaders who reward party loyalty but hamper legislators in

appealing directly to voters.

Introduction

The systematic study of electoral advantages accruing to incum-

bent off‌iceholders comes out of decades of research into the United

States Congress. This legislature exhibits an unusually high rate of

reelection. Reasons put forth for the ability of US off‌iceholders to secure

reelection include two. First, incumbents use the privileges of off‌ice to

direct government resources to their constituencies. These resources

include pork, patronage, and individual services. Legislators are highly

effective in credit claiming for the proliferation of these resources. They

have generally been successful in constructing a substantially sized

“personal vote” that guarantees ongoing electoral success (Cain,

Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987). Second, in part because of the effectiveness

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 4, November 2015 509

DOI: 10.1111 /lsq.12087

V

C2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

of credit claiming, name recognition among incumbents is greater than

for challengers. These factors combine to discourage entry by high-

quality challengers.

In single-member electoral districts, credit claiming is straightfor-

ward. Each district has a single legislator, who has no legislative

competitors seeking credit for activities in the district. Every bridge,

every street improvement, every government installation and job, and

every bureaucratic obstacle overcome is directly traceable to the incum-

bent legislator.

1

Multimember districts present a challenge to individual

off‌iceholders, simply because there are so many of them in each electoral

constituency. Credit claiming is accordingly more complicated. Propor-

tional representation also gives political parties more power in candidate

selection. The power of the parties comes from the ordering of the elec-

toral lists. Although PR exhibits numerous minor variations, it is

common for each political party to select as many candidates as seats in

each electoral district and to present voters with an ordered list of candi-

dates. Because the party organization orders the list, it is taken as

representing the party’s statement of the political priority it assigns to

candidates. Incumbents are therefore dependent on their parties for rese-

lection, a feature that imposes a loyalty premium. This in turn reduces

potential incumbency advantage.

Thus, the PR setting simultaneously reduces the ability of incum-

bents to credit claim with voters and increases the ability of political

party leaders to ensure the loyalty of backbenchers. In addition, com-

pared with single-member districts (SMD), the larger size of PR districts

makes it more diff‌icult for candidates to achieve independent name

recognition among voters. Even in the United States, most voters are not

able to name their congressional representative. Name recognition is

obviously more diff‌icult when party lists have 10, 20, or even 40 candi-

dates on them. In such a setting, voters tend to use the party’s ordering

of the names as guidance, which reinforces party control over incum-

bency advantage. Where legislators must curry favor with their party

leadership in order to obtain a high position on the party list, the incum-

bency effect mainly accrues to the party.

These considerations lead us to expect that only party leaders will

experience incumbency advantage in multimember PR. To the best of

our knowledge, however, this has not been documented empirically with

appropriate data and systematic statistical analysis. We adapt the stand-

ard regression discontinuity design used to assess incumbency

advantage in single-member electoral districts to a setting of open-list

multimember proportional representation (PR): the Italian lower House

of Representatives over 45 years following the end of World War II. We

510 Miriam A. Golden and Lucio Picci