{"id":2347,"date":"2009-07-25T15:12:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-25T19:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=2347"},"modified":"2009-07-25T15:12:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-25T19:12:00","slug":"numb3rs-incumbency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/?p=2347","title":{"rendered":"Numb3rs: Incumbency"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a quick look at competitiveness<\/a> last week, I wanted to touch on incumbency effects today.<\/p>\n

First of all, the technical part – if this bores you, just scroll down to the bolded<\/span> line below. I won’t think any less of you.<\/p>\n

To see how important an incumbent is, we need a way to calculate an expected<\/em> result. After spending a lot of time tinkering with various projection models, I’ve come to the conclusion<\/span> that a simple arithmetic transfer of votes works the best – at least for the 2006 and 2008 election, which is what I’m looking at (if you want to see residual charts and regressions and such to prove this, just e-mail me). So I carved the country into 30 geographic regions and projected accordingly – if the Liberal vote dropped 2 points in Calgary last election (it did!), I subtracted 2% from the 2006 result from every Calgary riding.<\/p>\n

How accurate is this? Well, half the results fall within +\/- 2% of the actual result, with 90% falling within +\/- 6%. The predicted values correlate 96.3% with the results. Keep in mind, we don’t expect the results to be spot on because, after all, the candidates and campaigns should<\/em> make a difference.<\/p>\n

For those interested in the fine print, by election winners were considered to be incumbents, so Bob Rae was an incumbent MP last election. And Garth Turner became a Liberal incumbent, with Wajid<\/span> Khan as a Tory incumbent (for what it’s worth, Turner’s impact was negligible, while Khan, not unsurprisingly, undershot<\/em> the expected Tory vote by 3%).<\/p>\n

So what does the data show?<\/p>\n

For both 2006 and 2008, in ridings<\/span> without<\/em> an incumbent, the incumbent party took a 4.1% hit compared to their expected result. Since the totals have to sum to zero, that means incumbents performed about 1% above expected, for an overall benefit of around 5%. These results were largely identical both elections and mesh well with the academic literature on the subject so I don’t have any reason to doubt them.
<\/strong>
What’s also interesting, as an aside, is that MPs<\/span> were more likely to call in quits in regions where their party was heading for a drop in support (think of the Tory Newfoundland MPs<\/span> before last election). So “spending more time with my family<\/em>” loosely translates to “I can see the writing on the wall<\/em>” quite often.<\/p>\n

Now, I do think it’s important not to read too much “cause and effect” into this. As Andrew Steele comments here<\/a> (citing freakonomics<\/span>…a book I adore<\/em>), incumbency effects are often overblown once other factors are controlled for. And when we’re talking about “incumbency”, we’re really talking about resources, organization, and “name recognition” – Gerard Kennedy and Justin Trudeau weren’t incumbents last election but I’d wager a lot more people knew who they were in their home ridings<\/span> than many obscure backbenchers (I’m looking at you Brian Jean). Quite simply, not all incumbents are created equal. But a 5% swing is nothing to sneeze at – 41 MPs<\/span> were elected by smaller margins than that last time.<\/p>\n

So, once MPs<\/span> start announcing their retirement, we should be paying attention. Because if they’re running in ridings<\/span> with a slim margin of victory, it certainly could put those seats into play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a quick look at competitiveness last week, I wanted to touch on incumbency effects today. First of all, the technical part – if this bores you, just scroll down to the bolded line below. I won’t think any less of you. To see how important an incumbent is, we need a way to calculate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[579],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fun-with-numb3rs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.calgarygrit.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}