The Power of Incumbency: Measuring Accountability and Advantage in Indonesia’s Legislative Elections
Abstract
Elections serve as a primary mechanism of democratic accountability, allowing voters to reward effective representatives and remove underperformers. In Indonesia’s open-list proportional representation system, incumbency offers a tangible record for retrospective evaluation. Using candidate-level data from the 2019 and 2024 legislative elections and an Ordinary Least Squares linear probability model, this study finds that incumbents hold a decisive advantage: winning in 2019 increases the likelihood of winning in 2024 by 61.4 percentage points. These results indicate that voters strongly value demonstrated performance over partisan loyalty, reinforcing incumbency as a channel for political accountability. However, such advantages may also limit political renewal, highlighting the need for institutional designs that balance accountability with electoral competitiveness.Downloads
Copyright (c) 2026 Irma Yulistiani, Jahen F. Rezki
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EKOMBIS REVIEW: Jurnal Ilmiah Ekonomi dan Bisnis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
