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WORKING PAPER
Estimating incumbency advantage and its variation, as an example of a before/after study
Gelman, AndrewHuang, Zaiying Abstract Incumbency advantage is one of the most studied features in American legislative elections. In this paper, we construct and implement an estimate that allows incumbency advantage to vary between individual incumbents. This model predicts that open-seat elections will be less variable than those with incumbents running, an observed empirical pattern that is not explained by previous models. We apply our method to the U.S. House of Representatives in the twentieth century: our estimate of the overall pattern of incumbency advantage over time is similar to previous estimates (although slightly lower), and we also find a pattern of increasing variation. In addition to the application to incumbency advantage, our approach represents a new method, using multilevel modeling, for estimating effects in before/after studies. Keywords Bayesian inference before-after study Congressional elections Gibbs File
Uploaded 02-07-2003 Document ID Number 71 |
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