Luis Schiumerini (PhD, Political Science, 2015), Department of Political Science, Notre Dame, is set to receive the 2026 Robert A. Dahl Award for “Incumbency Bias: Why Political Office is a Blessing and a Curse in Latin America.”
The Robert A. Dahl Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor an untenured scholar who has produced scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy. Robert Dahl was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sr. Research Scientist Sociology, Yale University, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding member of the British Academy, and a past President of the American Political Science Association.
Abstract:
The conventional wisdom in political science is that incumbency provides politicians with a massive electoral advantage. This assumption has been challenged by the recent anti-incumbent cycle. When is incumbency a blessing for politicians and when is it a curse? Incumbency Bias offers a unified theory that argues that democratic institutions will make incumbency a blessing or curse by shaping the alignment between citizens’ expectations of incumbent performance and incumbents’ capacity to deliver. This argument is tested through a comparative investigation of incumbency bias in Brazil, Argentina and Chile that draws on extensive fieldwork and an impressive array of experimental and observational evidence. Incumbency Bias demonstrates that rather than clientelistic or corrupt elites compromising accountability, democracy can generate an uneven playing field if citizens demand good governance but have limited information. While focused on Latin America, this book carries broader lessons for understanding the electoral returns to office around the world.
Review:
Incumbency Bias is an ‘ideal-type’ comparative politics book. From its opening pages, the puzzle is compelling and the argument is accessible to scholars across subfields. Schiumerini begins with a deceptively simple puzzle: why does holding office systematically help incumbents get reelected in some democracies while systematically hurting them in others? In doing so, he disrupts an often taken-for-granted assumption in much of political science…