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What does incumbent deterrence actually mean? At a basic level, one of the advantages
conveyed on incumbents is their ability to behave in a manner, while in office, that makes them more
attractive to the electorate. Action in office carries with it two potential benefits. First, incumbents can,
by making themselves more attractive to the electorate, win more votes—this is the direct electoral
benefit. There is also an indirect benefit; by becoming a more attractive, and therefore stronger,
candidate, incumbents can prevent the emergence of challengers who would mount strong campaigns. In
studying this indirect benefit, much of the literature has focused on the candidates, seeking to measure
factors such as the “quality” of the candidates. When it comes to certain actions, however, there has been
mixed success in establishing either the direct or indirect benefits. The particular action that is the focus
of this paper is the obtaining of distributive benefits, which include pork barrel programs.
This paper proposes a return to the theoretical underpinnings of Bond, Covington, and Fleisher
(1985) and suggests a new measure better suited to studying incumbent deterrence. To be perfectly clear,
this paper will not try to claim that traditional studies of quality are invalid or that use of the dichotomous
measure no longer serves a purpose. In studying incumbent activities, however, notions of candidate
quality may not capture those characteristics of the challenger’s campaign that directly relate to the
electoral prospects of the incumbent. Certainly, incumbents will seek to prevent challengers from
entering the race that are of a higher quality—that is challengers that possess a set of attributes that make
them more able to win an election. This paper, however, seeks to rephrase the question of incumbent
deterrence asking whether incumbents can, in a sense, derail an eventual challenging campaign. Not all
successful campaigns are mounted by quality or experienced challengers and restricting the examination
of deterrence to its effects on the candidate might miss the effects incumbent activities can have on the
campaign, even the campaigns of experienced challengers. When I propose a return to Bond, Covington,
and Fleisher (1985), I imply an examination of the strength of the challenger’s campaign. Specifically,
the measure of campaign strength proposed in this paper looks at three campaign characteristics:
experience, popularity, and resources. The analyses will determine whether such a measure is feasible
(whether we can measure these characteristics with one scale) and judge its performance in a standard
Convention