Incumbency Bias
Why Political Office is a Blessing and a Curse in Latin America

Explains why elections generate incumbency advantage in Argentina and the US, and incumbency disadvantage in India and Brazil.

Luis Schiumerini (Author)

9781009636506, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 June 2025

276 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.564 kg

'… a methodological tour de force.' Matthew M. Taylor, Latin American Politics and Society

The conventional wisdom in political science is that incumbency provides politicians with a massive electoral advantage. This assumption has been challenged by the recent anti-incumbent cycle. When is incumbency a blessing for politicians and when is it a curse? Incumbency Bias offers a unified theory that argues that democratic institutions will make incumbency a blessing or curse by shaping the alignment between citizens' expectations of incumbent performance and incumbents' capacity to deliver. This argument is tested through a comparative investigation of incumbency bias in Brazil, Argentina and Chile that draws on extensive fieldwork and an impressive array of experimental and observational evidence. Incumbency Bias demonstrates that rather than clientelistic or corrupt elites compromising accountability, democracy can generate an uneven playing field if citizens demand good governance but have limited information. While focused on Latin America, this book carries broader lessons for understanding the electoral returns to office around the world.

1. The puzzle of incumbency bias
2. Bounded accountability: a theory of incumbency bias
3. Too big to succeed: incumbency disadvantage in Brazilian municipalities
4. Commodity shocks and incumbency disadvantage in rural Brazil
5. When capacity meets authority: the incumbency advantage of southern cone governors
6. With narrow scope comes great advantage: incumbency bias in Chile
7. Microfoundations of incumbency bias: evidence from survey experiments
8. incumbency bias and democracy
References
Appendices.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB]