Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/57287 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 3773
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but 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 statements 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. This gives rise to the incumbency advantage. 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 the quality of the incumbent, as previously documented by the empirical literature. However, we show that this implies a non-monotonicity in the distortions that arise in equilibrium.
Subjects: 
incumbency advantage
electoral competition
information revelation
JEL: 
D72
D82
D60
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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