Recent studies have found that holding office is a disadvantage to incumbents seeking reelection in many developing democracies around the world, such as Brazil, India, and most post-communist Eastern European countries. This evidence stands in marked contrast to long-standing evidence of incumbency advantage in mature democracies, most notably the United States. Explanations for incumbency advantage abound. 

It is therefore puzzling why incumbency disadvantage observed in developing democracies should occur at all. Why are incumbents in these countries unable to increase their reelection probability by using their time in office to persuade voters of their quality? 

Klašnja argued theoretically that incumbency can be a disadvantage in several circumstances. Developing democracies exhibit considerably more corruption – defined as the misuse of public office for private or political gain – than mature democracies. Klašnja shows that incumbents can become more disadvantaged as the cost of committing corruption decreases. For example, lower sanctions or lower probability of detection of corruption can impel voters to compensate by being stricter at the polls. Second, when politics is generally corrupt, clean politicians are discouraged from running, decreasing the average quality of candidates on offer, including the quality of the incumbents, which in turn reduces any advantages conferred by incumbency. Finally, when gains to corruption increase with time spent in office, for example because stealing becomes easier though “learning on the job,” voters may prefer inexperienced challengers to entrenched incumbents.

Klašnja tested these hypotheses using innovative measures of local corruption in Romania, based on extensive data on wealth accumulation among Romanian mayors and their challengers, detailed data on waste in infrastructure spending, information from a large number of public procurement contracts, as well as rich data on corruption prosecutions by Romanian law enforcement. In order to isolate the causal effect of corruption on incumbency disadvantage, Klašnja  relied on (1) national rules tying mayoral salaries to population thresholds that cause jumps in the opportunity cost of corruption and thus its incidence, and (2) close elections that assign incumbency as if randomly. This strategy provides strong evidence that the large incumbency disadvantage found in Romanian local elections is caused by the incidence of corruption and the large seniority premium to corruption exploited by Romanian mayors.

However, high corruption environments are often accompanied by incumbents' attempts at electoral manipulation, through practices like vote-buying, electoral violence, and outright fraud. Such practices should limit the scope of the incumbency disadvantage, implying that it is more difficult to observe and explain it. The third part of the project tries analyzes the extent of electoral manipulation in Romania, and thus the extent to which the incumbency disadvantage is muted by the same forces related to corruption. Using a combination of constituency-level electoral data and individual-level data from a number of public opinion surveys, this part of the project identifies and explains electoral fraud in the Romanian presidential recall referendum of July 2012. Clear patterns of fraud are identified using a variety of standard and novel election fraud diagnostics, including tests of unusual turnout spikes at "round" turnout figures and suspicious discrepancies between individual and aggregate patterns of electoral preference changes in a brief amount of time between the 2012 local elections and the referendum. Additionally, the suspected fraud has clear partisan patterns, being concentrated in localities run by mayors from the governing co...

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