The incumbent is the current holder of an

office An office is a space where the employees of an organization perform Business administration, administrative Work (human activity), work in order to support and realize the various goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a po ...

or position. In an

election An election is a formal group decision-making process whereby a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold Public administration, public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative d ...

, the incumbent is the person holding or acting in the position that is up for election, regardless of whether they are seeking re-election. There may or may not be an incumbent on the

ballot A ballot is a device used to cast votes in an election and may be found as a piece of paper or a small ball used in voting. It was originally a small ball (see blackballing) used to record decisions made by voters in Italy around the 16th cent ...

: the previous holder may have died, retired, resigned; they may not seek re-election, be barred from re-election due to

term limit A term limit is a legal restriction on the number of terms a person may serve in a particular elected office. When term limits are found in presidential and semi-presidential systems they act as a method of curbing the potential for monopoly, w ...

s, or a new

electoral division An electoral (congressional, legislative, etc.) district, sometimes called a constituency, riding, or ward, is a geographical portion of a political unit, such as a country, state or province, city, or administrative region, created to provid ...

or position may have been created, at which point the office or position is regarded as vacant or open. In the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

, an election without an incumbent on the ballot is an open seat or open contest.

Etymology

The word "incumbent" is derived from the Latin verb ''incumbere'', literally meaning "to lean or lay upon" with the present participle stem ''incumbent-'', "leaning a variant of ''encumber,''''OED'' (1989), p. 834 while encumber is derived from the root ''cumber'', most appropriately defined: "To occupy obstructively or inconveniently; to block fill up with what hinders freedom of motion or action; to burden, load."

Incumbency advantage

In general, an incumbent has a political advantage over challengers at

s. Except when the timing of elections is determined by a constitution or by legislation, the incumbent in some countries may have the right to determine the date of an election. For most political offices, the incumbent often has more

name recognition In politics, name recognition is the ability a voter has to identify a candidate's name due to a certain amount of previous exposure through various campaigning methods. It can be described as the awareness voters have about specific candidates r ...

due to their previous work in the office. Incumbents also have easier access to

campaign finance Campaign financealso called election finance, political donations, or political financerefers to the funds raised to promote candidates, political parties, or policy initiatives and referendums. Donors and recipients include individuals, corpor ...

, as well as government resources (such as the franking privilege) that can be indirectly used to boost the incumbent's re-election campaign. In the United States, an election (especially for a

single-member constituency A single-member district or constituency is an electoral district represented by a single officeholder. It contrasts with a multi-member district, which is represented by multiple officeholders. In some countries, such as Australia and India ...

in a

legislature A legislature (, ) is a deliberative assembly with the legal authority to make laws for a political entity such as a country, nation or city on behalf of the people therein. They are often contrasted with the executive and judicial power ...

) in which an incumbent is not seeking re-election is often called an ''open seat''; because of the lack of incumbency advantage, these are often amongst the most hotly contested races in any election. Also, an open contest is created when the term of office is limited, as in the case of terms of the U.S. president being restricted to two four-year terms, and the incumbent is prohibited from recontesting. Although the expected advantage of incumbency has gone from about two percentage points in the 1950s, to ten percentage points in the 1980s and 1990s, and then back to about two percentage points in the 2010s and 2020s, the probability that an incumbent will lose his or her seat has remained approximately the same over the entire period. When newcomers look to fill an open office, voters tend to compare and contrast the candidates' qualifications, positions on political issues, and personal characteristics in a relatively straightforward way. Elections featuring an incumbent, on the other hand, are, as Guy Molyneux puts it, "fundamentally a referendum on the incumbent." Voters will first grapple with the record of the incumbent. Only if they decide to "fire" the incumbent do they begin to evaluate whether each of the challengers is an acceptable alternative. A 2017 study in the '' British Journal of Political Science'' argues that the incumbency advantage stems from the fact that voters evaluate the incumbent's ideology individually whereas they assume that any challenger shares his party's ideology. This means that the incumbency advantage gets more significant as

political polarization Political polarization (spelled ''polarisation'' in British English, Australian English, and New Zealand English) is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes. Scholars distinguish between ideologi ...

increases. A 2017 study in the ''

Journal of Politics A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization *Diary, a record of personal secretive thoughts and as open book to personal therapy or used to feel connected to onesel ...

'' found that incumbents have "a far larger advantage" in on-cycle elections than in off-cycle elections.

Business usage

In relation to business operations and

competition Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared: where one's gain is the other's loss (an example of which is a zero-sum game). Competition can arise between entities such as organisms, indi ...

, an incumbent supplier is usually the supplier who currently supplies the needs of a customer and therefore has an advantageous position in relation to maintaining this role or agreeing a new contract, in comparison with competing businesses.

Sophomore surge

Political analysts in the United States and United Kingdom have noted the existence of a

sophomore surge A sophomore surge (sometimes referred to in the United Kingdom as first-term incumbency bonus) is a term used in the political science of the United States Congress that refers to an increase in votes that congressional candidates (candidates for t ...

(not known as such in the United Kingdom) in which first term representatives see an increase in votes after their first election. This phenomenon is said to bring an advantage of up to 10% for first-term representatives, which increases the incumbency advantage. However, the extent of the surge is a biased estimate of the electoral advantage of incumbency.

Anti-incumbency

However, there exist scenarios in which the incumbency factor itself leads to the downfall of the incumbent. Popularly known as the anti-incumbency factor, situations of this kind occur when the incumbent has proven themself not worthy of office during their tenure and the challengers demonstrate this to the voters. An anti-incumbency factor can also be responsible for bringing down incumbents who have been in office for many successive terms despite performance indicators, simply because the voters are convinced by the challengers of a need for change. It is also argued that the holders of extensively powerful offices are subject to immense pressure which leaves them politically impotent and unable to command enough public confidence for re-election; such is the case, for example, with the Presidency of France. Voters who experience the negative

economic shock In economics, a shock is an unexpected or unpredictable event that affects an economy, either positively or negatively. Technically, it is an unpredictable change in exogenous variable, exogenous factors—that is, factors unexplained by an econo ...

of a loss of income are less likely to vote for an incumbent candidate than those who have not experienced such a shock. Nick Panagakis, a pollster, coined what he dubbed the ''incumbent rule'' in 1989—that any voter who claims to be undecided towards the end of the election will probably end up voting for a challenger. In France, the phenomenon is known by the catchphrase ''Sortez les sortants'' ("Get out the outgoing epresentatives"), which was the slogan of the

Poujadist Pierre Poujade (; 1 December 1920 – 27 August 2003) was a French right-wing populist politician after whom the Poujadist movement was named. Biography Pierre Poujade was born in Saint-Céré (Le Lot), France, and studied at Collège Saint- ...

movement in the

1956 French legislative election Legislative elections were held in France on 2 January 1956 to elect the third National Assembly (France), National Assembly of the French Fourth Republic, Fourth Republic. The elections were held using party-list proportional representation. Th ...

References

Sources

* ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

''. 2nd ed. 1989. Print.