Incumbency advantage in the municipal mayoral elections in Buenos Aires

Abstract

This paper tests for an incumbency advantage in the municipal mayoral elections in the province of Buenos Aires between 1983 and 2015 by making use of a regression discontinuity design, for the two major parties: the Partido Justicialista and the Union Civica Radical. The results suggest that the UCR enjoyed an incumbency advantage in the order of a 20 percentage point increase in the probability of winning the next election, while for the PJ this estimate is smaller and non statistically significant. Even though this advantage is unusual in a developing country, its presence is consistent with Klašnja y Titiunik (2017) where it is argued that the incumbency disadvantage is due to weak parties and term limits for mayors; neither of them occurs in Buenos Aires.