Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems—Evidence from French Elections

Free and fair elections should incentivize elected officials to exert effort and enable citizens to select representative politicians and occasionally replace incumbents. However, incumbency advantage and coordination failures possible in multi-party systems may jeopardize this process. We ask whether these two forces compound each other. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) in French two-round local and parliamentary elections, we find that close winners are more likely to run again and to win the next election by 33 and 25 percentage points, respectively. Incumbents who run again personalize their campaign communication more and face fewer ideologically close competitors, revealing that parties from the incumbent’s orientation coordinate more effectively than parties on the losing side. A complementary RDD shows that candidates who marginally qualify for the runoff also rally new voters. We conclude that party coordination on the incumbent and voter coordination on candidates who won or gained visibility in a previous election both contribute to incumbents’ future success.