Publication: Political salaries, electoral selection and the incumbency advantage: Evidence from a wage reform
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2021-12-01
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Elsevier
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Abstract
Incumbents tend to gain solid electoral advantage in many voting systems. In this study, we examine the relationship between salaries prescribed to politicians and the incumbency advantage by exploiting a political wage reform and data from close elections in a proportional semi-open list system in the Czech Republic. We show that higher salaries reduce the average incumbency advantage, as they increase the probability to run again for previously non-elected candidates much more than for incumbents. Still, we find that higher wages improve candidate selection, especially by encouraging repeated candidacy from university-educated incumbents. Higher wages also improve relative positions of re-running incumbents on candidate lists compared to previously non-elected re-running candidates. Our results overall suggest that incumbency per se changes the relationship between political wages and candidate selection.
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Electoral selection, Incumbency advantage, Local elections, Political salaries, Regression discontinuity
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Palguta, J., & Pertold, F. (2021). Political salaries, electoral selection and the incumbency advantage: Evidence from a wage reform. En Journal of Comparative Economics, 49 (4), pp. 1020-1047