What Is the Consensus on Incumbency Advantage in the Northwest Territories?

• In Event: Emerging Scholars Lightning Round: Graduate Student Research: Contemporary Issues in (Non)Democratic Governance

Abstract

What is the strength of incumbency advantage in a non-partisan electoral system? More specifically, does incumbency advantage in non-partisan electoral systems align with or contradict what we expect in a partisan electoral system? Little to no work has examined whether the conclusions of the standard incumbency advantage literature travel to non-partisan systems. This thesis uses Canada’s three Northern territories as a case study to compare incumbency advantage partisan versus non-partisan political systems. The thesis uses a regression discontinuity design and logistic regression models to measure incumbency advantage in the territories.

The thesis finds mixed results on incumbency advantage. On one hand, the results suggest that there is a weak scare-off effect experienced by incumbents in territorial elections. Moreover, contrary to expectations, incumbency is weaker in rural districts compared to urban districts. Lastly, the findings of this thesis suggest that incumbency advantage in Nunavut is weaker than in the Northwest Territories. With that being said, no difference in incumbency was found between in consensus government and the Yukon’s partisan system.

This thesis contributes to three subfields of political science research. First, this thesis demonstrated the methodological challenges of working with small sample sizes, which have the tendency to limit the ability to use causal inference methods. Likewise, this thesis contributed to the incumbency advantage literature, using a non-partisan case study, which showed that partisanship should not be over-emphasized when studying incumbency. Lastly, this paper contributed to the Northern Canadian politics literature, by presenting a new dataset on territorial elections, and using quantitative methods on a case study that has previously relied on qualitative research.

Author

• Christopher Yurris, McGill University