Do Elections Select for Better Representatives?

Incumbents significantly outperform challengers in American elections, but the normative implications of this phenomenon are ambiguous. Do incompetent officials exploit the political system to keep themselves in power, or do open elections effectively select for good leaders? To address this question, I define and estimate three components of incumbent success in elections— (1) party match, (2) quality selection, and (3) officeholder benefit—the first two of which are crucial for evaluating the health of democratic elections. Results are largely reassuring; a significant portion of incumbent success can be attributed to the fact that previous elections selected for high-quality candidates that match the partisan preferences of voters. However, the results vary in meaningful ways across time and settings. For example, party match has decreased over time while quality selection and officeholder benefit have increased, and the magnitude of quality selection relative to party match increases with the salience of the electoral setting. 1 I thank Scott Ashworth, Chris Berry, Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Gloria Chao, Andy Hall, Seth Hill, Jim Snyder, Mona Vakilifathi, and seminar participants at Berkeley, UChicago, and UCSD for helpful comments.