ABSTRACT This study reframes Hong Kong's Legislative Council geographical constituency elections as a case of limited competition produced by institutional design. Using candidate‐level data, we examine how organizational resources and competition structure shape electoral outcomes under a mixed system that combines proportional representation in GCs with functional constituencies. This study finds a strong incumbency effect present but it operates as a background regularity rather than the decisive mechanism. Secondly, party organizational capacity matters asymmetrically: larger grassroots networks—as proxied by the number of same‐party District Council members—are positively associated with winning, while greater same‐party LegCo strength exhibits diminishing, consistent with elite crowding and intra‐camp competition. Third, increasing party fragmentation and candidate crowding depress overall winning probabilities, indicating systemic constraints on entry and cross‐party evaluation. The analysis provides a historical trend for understanding electoral dynamics in a hybrid regime and offers comparable evidence on how institutional rules and meso‐level party infrastructures structure competition.
Zhi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.