Political incumbency effects in India: a regional analysis

The significance of a study of political incumbency and the factors influencing it stems from the fact that it directly affects the behaviour of the incumbent political party and its accountability to the electorate. We use data on Parliamentary Elections in India from 1980 to 2014 to tease out evidence of incumbency advantage. We employ Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to estimate the incumbency effect. Our results indicate the absence of any incumbency effect when considering all elections in India together. This finding is at odds with the research reported so far. To explain our contrary result, we drilled down deeper to obtain a more granular view of the incumbency effect in India. We do this across various regions of India. The results show that north Indian states generally show strong evidence of incumbency disadvantage while south Indian states show strong evidence of incumbency advantage. We also show that incumbency advantage has increased over time.