Taking Terms? Incumbency Effects at Local Elections

Studying legislatures, incumbency rates are most often found to be very high. But how about local politics – are the incumbency rates lower (due to the often unpaid status of the office) or higher (due to less competition among candidates) than in national politics? And not least how does the incumbency effects show? In this paper we will disentangle the incumbency effects of the nomination and the electoral phase, and study who among the councilors benefits the most of the incumbency effects. Are men often incumbents than women? Are committee chair positions positively affecting incumbency rates? Are incumbency rates higher in some parties than in others?. We build the analyses on a dataset covering all 9.556 candidates (of whom 2.432 were elected councilors) at the 2017 local elections in Denmark. The paperwill address discussions of electoral competitiveness, party gatekeeping and political hierarchies within local politics. A working hypothesis is that the high incumbency rates are based more on the nomination than on the electoral phase (party nominators prefer incumbents more than voters) and that this is very advantageous to male candidates and not least those WHO already have elite positions such as committee chairmanships.