Incumbent Effects on Individual-Level Voting Behavior in Congressional Elections: A Decade of Exaggeration

This study challenges the widespread belief that members of the challengers' party have been defecting to incumbents at 50% levels and traces this perception to the coincidence of methodological discontinuities in the initiating studies of individual-level incumbent effects with the pro-incumbent bias in the 1978 and 1980 data. These originating discontinuities are briefly examined and the best available means of sustaining continuity and accuracy established. Defection toward incumbents and other individual-level pro-incumbent figures are then shown to be much lower than is currently thought.