Abstract. I study a model of electoral incentives in which elections serve as public signals of an incumbent’s popularity but do not mechanically determine succession. The key innovation is that popularity is endogenously determined through costly effort rather than taken as exogenous. I ask under what conditions the ability to manipulate elections increases the incumbent’s equilibrium effort relative to a fully fair election that truthfully reveals popularity. I show that manipulation can induce more effort (and thus produce genuinely more popular incumbents) provided that (i) incumbent effort is publicly observed and (ii) the incumbent can publicly commit ex-ante to a level of electoral manipulation.