At our sister blog, Lee discusses strategic retirement, or lack thereof, in the Supreme Court.
This is a good time for me to bring up my point that congressmembers and senators appear to decide make these decisions non-strategically, being more likely to retire when their party most needs them and their incumbency advantage and being less likely to retire when the could be replaced more costlessly. (For example, Frank Lautenberg running for reelection in 2008, a year when the Democrats could well have afforded a fresh face in a New Jersey senate race with little chance of losing.)
I see your examples not as non-strategic but as strategic in a self-interested way. Parties need incumbents most when they are drifting out of power, but incumbents may not feel like fighting a difficult election for the promise of less power than they held prior to the election. Likewise, incumbents may prefer to stay in power even when it would benefit the party to swap in a new player.
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/prc/papers/stolzenber…
I haven't read it carefully, but the punchline from the Stolzenberg paper is "Using discrete time series logit analyses of the odds of retiring in office and controlling for the Year and a justice’s Age, Pension Eligibility, and length of Tenure in office, we found that the odds that a justice will retire in the first two years of the term of a president of the same party as the president who first appointed him to the Court are about 2.6 times the odds of retiring under a president of the opposite party in the last two years of his presidency."
Corey:
1. I was referring to strategic for party or ideological benefit, in the same way that Lee had discussed strategic retirement of judges.
2. "Strategic" requires some strategy or planning. I wouldn't call it "strategic" for someone to retire because he thinks he might lose, or because he thinks it might not be so fun to stay in Congress.