Party System, Incumbency Disadvantage and Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy & Autocracy

Abstract

In weak democracies, we often observe either a highly volatile part system, characterized by frequent alternations in power, or a dominant party in power for multiple consecutive elections cycles and democratic backsliding. In weak democracies, with weak institutions that offer little legal and financial protection to political actors without access to state resources, incumbents can consolidate power relatively easily. Voting out incumbents is one tool that citizens can use to make sure no one party is in power long enough to consolidate their electoral advantage. The result is frequent alternations in power and volatility that characterize many developing countries. The very same institutional setting that makes alternation an attractive tool for voters against democratic transgressions, however, can cause elections to malfunction as a tool for accountability in the opposite way. The voters might choose to never vote out their most-preferred party even in the face of most outrageous democratic transgressions if they believe that their most-preferred political party cannot survive out of power. In this paper, we develop a formal model of alternation of power that aims to explain both incumbency disadvantage and democratic backsliding. We argue that which of the two outcomes will be observed depends on the party system characteristics and the configuration of political parties. This model also explains how slight policy advantage translates into a large electoral advantage and concentration of power in the long run. We use survey data on presidential approval rates and incumbents’ vote shares in Latin American to test the hypotheses derived from the model.

Author

• Seda Ozturk, University of Rochester