| Abstrakt: |
The concept of incumbency advantage has, for more than 40 years, been a frequently discussed topic in American political science. The fact that incumbents, for various reasons, have a noticeable advantage over their challengers also brings new questions, notably what the sources of this advantage are and how exactly this advantage is reflected in the elections. Our aim was to apply the concept of incumbency advantage to the Czech political environment, specifically the Senate elections. Our research faced several challenges stemming mainly from fundamental differences between the political systems of the United States and the Czech Republic. We had to adjust the existing theoretical knowledge and measuring instruments in order to perform an analysis of the Czech Senate elections from 1998 to 2012 and answer the main research question of whether there is or not an advantage for incumbent senators in the Czech Republic. On the basis of the analysis of data from the election results, this could not be confirmed. To the contrary, in many cases, the very fact that a particular politician defends a mandate may in fact be a disadvantage. Such a claim is also in line with several other studies with a similar theme and we hope our paper will be an impulse for further research on the topic of incumbency advantage in the Czech Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
