Incumbency Advantage and the Role of Political Parties in the Electoral Authoritarianism: Evidence From Hong Kong Legislative Council Election (1998–2016)

This study reframes Hong Kong's Legislative Council geographical constituency elections as a case of limited competition produced by institutional design. Using candidate-level data, we examine how organizational resources and competition structure shape electoral outcomes under a mixed system that combines proportional representation in GCs with functional constituencies. This study finds a strong incumbency effect present but it operates as a background regularity rather than the decisive mechanism. Secondly, party organizational capacity matters asymmetrically: larger grassroots networks—as proxied by the number of same-party District Council members—are positively associated with winning, while greater same-party LegCo strength exhibits diminishing, consistent with elite crowding and intra-camp competition. Third, increasing party fragmentation and candidate crowding depress overall winning probabilities, indicating systemic constraints on entry and cross-party evaluation. The analysis provides a historical trend for understanding electoral dynamics in a hybrid regime and offers comparable evidence on how institutional rules and meso-level party infrastructures structure competition. © 2026 The Author(s).