Chapter 2 presents the bounded accountability theory of incumbency bias and its main empirical predictions and outlines the core empirical strategy for testing the theory across the country–office cases. After offering a conceptualization and typology of incumbency bias, the chapter explains how the nature of the information environment encourages retrospective voting and leads to the emergence of incumbency bias. Based on this general mechanism, the chapter predicts that the alignment of policy scope and fiscal institutions explains why some democracies exhibit incumbency advantage while others display an incumbency disadvantage, and demonstrates how exogenous shocks may lead to within-country changes in incumbency bias. The chapter also derives predictions about why there are differences between personal and party incumbency bias. It concludes by developing a novel estimation framework that extends the close-election regression discontinuity design to measure incumbency bias in different political systems and document variation in direction and type within them.

Chapter 7 employs original survey experiments to test the theory’s microfoundations. The experimental settings display wide variation in incumbency bias and the designs balance the tradeoff between abstraction and control. The results are consistent with bounded accountability: citizens process information about fiscal shocks in a rationally. In Brazil, when the hypothetical nature of the scenario deprives them of prior information about candidates, citizens only respond to information about a fiscal windfall when it is effectively deployed in their district. In Argentina, where the scenario is real and citizens thus hold prior views about incumbents, citizens react according to the predictions of rational updating – that is, improving low evaluations when they learn that incumbents have high responsibility and downgrading evaluations after being told that incumbents have access to external resources. The Brazil experiment also provides evidence consistent with a key assumption of bounded accountability: when given the opportunity, citizens substitute exogenously driven performance for more informative shortcuts – such as party labels and programmatic differences.

Chapter 3 tests the book’s theory in Brazilian mayoral elections, drawing on evidence from fieldwork, secondary sources, and administrative data. Consistent with theoretical expectations for a setting with wide scope and low capacity, Brazilian incumbents suffer from a large incumbency disadvantage. While fiscal institutions structurally condition incumbent capacity and generate persistent levels of incumbency bias, exogenous shocks to capacity lead to changes in incumbency bias over time and across subnational units. This chapter illustrates that changes in fiscal transfers lead to variations in incumbency bias. It also exploits Brazil’s Fiscal Responsibility Law of 2000 as a natural experiment to determine how institutional shocks shape capacity. Using a differences-in-differences design,it demonstrates that incumbency disadvantage only emerged in municipalities running deficits – where the law was binding. This appears to reflect changes in public goods spending rather than in personnel spending – a proxy for patronage. The chapter also establishes that term limits increase incumbency disadvantage by attenuating performance voting and increasing costs of ruling.

This chapter motivates the book’s central questions: Why is incumbency an electoral blessing for politicians in some countries but an electoral curse in others? Why does incumbency bias emerge? What are the consequences of incumbency bias for democracy? The chapter then presents the book’s bounded accountability theory in brief: incumbency bias emerges and varies because democratic institutions generate a mismatch between citizens’ expectations of incumbent performance and incumbents’ capacity to deliver. The chapter clarifies how this argument builds and expands upon prior work on incumbency bias in Latin America and the US, and how it draws theoretical insights from theoretical and empirical work on electoral accountability. The chapter also distils contrasting predictions between bounded accountability and theories that stress corruption and clientelism as the drivers of incumbency advantage and disadvantage. The chapter closes by describing the case selection and outlining its nested-multilevel research design that combines cross-country and within-country comparisons and employs tools of causal inference to examine incumbency bias in Argentina, Brazil and Chile.

Chapter 5 examines incumbency bias in settings where incumbents have high capacity: Argentina and Brazil. Though governors wield high levels of responsibility, they do so with far less severe fiscal restrictions than Brazilian mayors. In both cases, revenue flows are fairly stable and fund a high proportion of spending. At the same time, Argentine governors reportedly often win elections by disbursing patronage and buying votes, making them a least likely case for my theory. However, the analysis indicates that in both cases, spending on public goods is just as effective as spending on personnel for building an incumbency advantage. The contrast between Brazil and Argentina also helps examine the theory’s predictions regarding how party organizations affect the type of incumbency bias. While strong yet nonprogrammatic parties allow parties and candidates to benefit from incumbency advantage in Argentina, high levels of personalism restrict Brazilian candidates’ incumbency advantage. Lastly, the chapter shows that in Argentina public goods spending has a stronger effect on incumbency bias that proxies for patronage and clientelism.

In the days leading up to Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, and in a circulated letter written after the initial violence outside the Morant Bay courthouse on October 11, Black Native Baptist deacon Paul Bogle called on other residents of St. Thomas-in-the-East to join him in fighting for the rights of the parish’s Black residents. He framed the events that were unfolding as a race war and urged others to join the cause, “Skin for skin!” Chapter 2 traces the interpretive history of this slogan, drawn from Job 2:4, and shows how it came to be used within the international anti-slavery movement. In using the phrase, Bogle aimed at a Black alliance that would cut across ethnic, religious, and class lines and that would be willing to meet White violence with a violent Black response. Although the rebellion was crushed, Bogle’s vision has lived on, shaping the experience of race in Jamaica today.

On behalf of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society, Quaker reformer Eliza Wigham drafted a public letter of condolence to Maria Jane, wife of George William Gordon, who had been executed for his alleged involvement in Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Wigham applied Matthew 25:40 – “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” – to George William Gordon. Chapter 5 shows how this text reflected a central pillar of the logic of the international anti-slavery movement. As deployed in sermons, speeches at public meetings, and argumentative pamphlets and books, including some penned by Wigham, this biblical text encoded a hierarchy that valued White heroism while delegitimizing Black agency in resisting White power. The chapter thus reckons with the fact that in the years and decades after the rebellion Bogle and other Black Jamaicans who died with him were viewed, even by White liberals, as misguided, or even barbarous.

Chapter 1 recounts some of the main events of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Compared to other historical reconstructions, the chapter emphasizes the influence of the end of the American Civil War and debates about Reconstruction on the rebellion and its coverage in the press. The chapter offers a basic narrative framework within which to understand the arguments presented in Chapters 2 through 6.