Of those who sought to return to the legislature for another term of office, some failed in the effort. These losing incumbents, however, are vastly outnumbered by the winning incumbents in election after election. The success rate of incumbents has not fallen below 60% since Independence and reached a remarkable 85% in 2008. The impact of this pattern on the composition of parliament is noted elsewhere on this website.

There is no information on why some of the incumbents did not seek another term; the reasons could have been death, decrepitude, disenchantment or the refusal of their party to nominate them again. In most of the recent elections, few of the incumbents retired from electoral competition. Moreover, for a number of them this was a temporary abstention and they returned to the fray at a later stage. ( Click here for a list of these "resurgent" candidates.) On the whole there is a quite low rate of retirements and this would seem to attest to the attraction of legislative service in Malta.

Both the Table and the Figure below show, in summary fashion, how the various incumbents distributed themselves among the three categories.

Note: The data are for incumbents at the end, not at the beginning, of each legislative period. Thus they exclude persons who were initially elected but failed to complete their term of office because of death or resignation; instead their mid-term successors are treated as the incumbents.