Pros and cons of incumbency

The statement by the European Union Election Observer Mission (EU-EOM) in its Official Report on the September 1st elections, “An undue advantage of incumbency distorted the level playing field during the election campaign,” has generated widespread commentaries, especially after President Ali weighed in to point out that the issue of incumbency and elections is a much more nuanced one than the Report implies. In a nutshell, the President pointed out that, “There are negatives and positives with incumbency. The People’s Progressive Party Civic delivered on all of its commitments… The Government has a responsibility to highlight and celebrate its delivery and results.” We feel that it is important for our democratic form of Government that this point is better appreciated.
It is a trite observation in political science – amounting to a “law” – that in all political systems there exists what is labelled “the incumbency bonus” – the fact that incumbents get more media attention than the opposition. This is true of every country in the EU, for instance, and is certainly not confined to Guyana. Governments, after all, are engaged constantly in activities affecting all spheres of national life – political, cultural, economic, social and infrastructural development, etc. That is what they are elected to do, based on manifestos they presented in the election campaigns, which naturally provides grist for the media that has to constantly justify its existence in every news cycle.
The Opposition, on the other hand, while free to engage in newsworthy activities, focuses more on the Government not keeping its promises or taking other negative swipes. Ironically, the Opposition parties therefore also work very hard to keep the Government in the public’s eye. The media, which started out as “the print press”, also has a tradition of viewing Governments as a potentially dictatorial “Leviathan” against which the “people” must always be guarded. Over the hundreds of years of democratic Government, many social groups have also arisen that adopt this perspective and issue critical assessments of Governmental activities.
All of this creates another “law” – “the incumbency burden”. News covering incumbents, which is already persistently extensive, is therefore associated with a more negative tone than news featuring the opposition. Governments are almost invariably criticised for not doing enough, so this incumbency burden in turn negatively affects support for the Government. The strict and negatively bent scrutiny leads to what has been called “the cost of ruling – the fact that incumbents lose support at the next election. This is another of the few empirical laws of political science documented in a number of studies. Governments are therefore driven to publicise their achievements to address this negativity.
The cost of ruling thus underlies alternation in office, which is a key mechanism of democratic representation, ensuring that executive power rests with different segments of the electorate and that changing public preferences are reflected in Government policies. For the longest while our politics had been inordinately influenced by ethnic identifications, where support for the major parties was not generated by party performance in delivering on promises but rather by being identified with one or the other major ethnic group.
However, with Guyana experiencing massive demographic changes through emigration, we have become a nation of minorities where parties have to practise to a greater extent what is called “valency politics”. Here the performance of the party vis-à-vis pertinent issues generates support at elections. As such, we have witnessed first an opposition majority in the National Assembly in 2011 and then the classic alternation of Governments in 2015 and 2020. If incumbency advantage were so preponderant, this could not have occurred and, as such, gives the lie to the claim that our electoral process is fatally flawed by the phenomenon.
In real terms, Guyana, along with looking at Governmental activities with a sceptical eye, as with every other democracy, has some media reporting that falls along a spectrum of support for the policies of the Government or the opposition. As such, it is a travesty of justice for the EU-EOM to suggest that it was the “undue advantage” of incumbency that led to the September 1st results.