Turnover and Inherited Support in Polish Mayoral Elections

While the incumbency advantage is a well-studied political asset, boosting the electoral support, we know much less about the open races in which the governing parties nominate new candidates or the current office-holders “anoint” their successors. This seems a central issue for the research on electoral turnover. In our paper, we ask under what conditions new candidates of the governing parties win in open races, or – in other words – to what extent the electoral support can be inherited by the new candidates. Using the example of direct mayoral elections held in the last decade in Poland, we are able to distinguish between the candidates of four well-established national parties and local independent lists, usually organized by the independent mayors. We assume that the efficiency of “successions” is higher in the case of political parties, due to the party loyalties and relatively lower level of personalization. We also hypothesize that this relationship is moderated by the degree to which local governments are party-politicized. In the empirical tests, we use the electoral data to model the chances of effective succession. We employ the logistic regression, controlling for the candidates’ personal vote-earning attributes and party affiliations.