How do candidates spend their money? Objects of campaign spending and the effectiveness of diversification

We present a novel approach to the study of campaign effectiveness using disaggregated spending returns from the 2007 Irish general election. While previous studies have focused on overall levels of expenditure as a predictor of electoral success, we consider the types of activities on which candidates spent money and the overall diversification of candidates’ campaign expenditure as predictors of electoral success. We offer a replicable framework for the measurement of campaign diversification as well as for the evaluation of its effects on electoral performance. We examine how factors such as campaign expenditure and candidates’ incumbency status condition the effects of campaign diversification. It is shown that diversification is only related to electoral success when campaigns are well-financed.     

Activating voters in congressional elections

This paper shows that one of the consequences of electoral campaigns is activation. Much research in the last decade has shown that campaign spending is related to electoral outcomes, but nearly all of this research has been conducted on district-level data, so we do not know how campaigns influence individual voters. This research returns to the theoretical framework offered inThe People's Choice and shows that at least part of the effect of campaigns is due to the increased likelihood of people voting when campaigns are more intense.     

Why bother campaigning? Campaign effectiveness in the 2009 European Parliament elections

This paper explores the effectiveness of European Parliament candidates' campaigns. We analyze the relationship between candidates' spending and their likelihood of success, controlling for a range of relevant co-varying factors. We then investigate whether the effects of electoral spending are conditioned by two variables: ballot design and incumbency. We find that, ceteris paribus, spending was positively related to a candidate's likelihood of electoral success in the 2009 campaign, though this effect is small in scale. We also reveal that the electorally positive effects of spending are observable across both 'party-centered' and ‘candidate-centered’ ballot structures, and that there is some evidence that incumbent spending is less effective than challenger spending.     

The effects of party competition on budget outcomes: Empirical evidence from local governments in Spain

This paper investigates the link between local budget outcomes and the intensity of party competition, measured as the margin of victory obtained by the incumbent in the previous local election (i.e. the difference between the vote share and 50%). Two competing hypotheses are tested in the paper. On the one hand, the Leviathan government hypothesis suggests that the lower the intensity of party competition is, the greater is the increase in the size of the local public sector, irrespective of the ideology of the party in power. On the other hand, the Partisan government hypothesis suggests that the incumbent will find it easier to advance its platform when intensity of competition is low (i.e., parties on the left/right will increase/decrease the size of the local public sector when the intensity of the challenge from the opposition is low). These hypotheses are tested with information on spending, own revenues and deficit for more than 500 Spanish local governments over 8 years (1992–1999), and information on the results of two local electoral contests (1991 and 1995). The evidence favors the Partisan hypothesis over the Leviathan one. We found that, for left-wing governments, spending, taxes and deficits increased as the electoral margin increases; whereas, for right-wing governments, a greater margin of victory led to reductions in all these variables.     

After Citizens United: How outside spending shapes American democracy

We study the political consequences of lifting restrictions on the funding of groups engaging in outside spending (e.g., independent political advertising) in elections. Theoretically, we assume that outside spending changes the salience of candidate-specific attributes relative to their party labels. Empirically, we employ a difference-in-differences design that exploits the removal of state-level restrictions on the funding of outside spending mandated by the federal-level rulings in both Citizens United and SpeechNow.org v. FEC. We find strong evidence that these regulatory changes increase the electoral success of Republican candidates, thereby leading to more ideologically conservative legislatures. We find no effect on polarization. Consistent with our theory, the size of our estimated effects depends on the power of labor unions and the alignment of business interests with the Republican party.     

Elections and government spending

It is widely believed that electoral pressures cause legislators to favor government spending programs. This electoral theory of spending is shown to encompass two core hypotheses: (1) the electoral consequences hypothesis, which states that support for spending programs improves the representative's electoral showing; and (2) the legislator insecurity hypothesis, which states that greater electoral insecurity leads representatives to be more in favor of spending programs. A test of these ideas using spending scores for U.S. representatives in 1986 finds that neither hypothesis is supported by the data.     

Additional incumbent spending really can harm (at least some) incumbents: An analysis of vote share maximization

The literature on the effects of campaign expenditures on electoral outcomes implicitly suggests that incumbent spending cannot have a negative marginal impact on the incumbent's vote share. Indeed, that literature has spent a great deal of effort finding positive and significant effects of incumbent spending. This paper shows that there are circumstances under which theory predicts zero and even negative impacts of incumbent spending. Estimating equations derived from the theory provide strong support for the base model, though only weak support for the extensions which predict nonpositive marginal products for incumbents.     

The Regulation of Third Party Campaigning in UK Elections

This article looks at the regulation of third parties in UK election law. During the 2019 general election campaign, media reports noted an increase in non-party organisations spending money on electoral advertisements on social media. Such advertisements raised a number of ethical questions, related to spending, transparency, and the content of the messages. Despite such recent concerns, third party electoral activity in the UK is not new, and the existing legal framework regulates campaign spending. That framework has its roots in Victorian-era election law and has been periodically updated. This article will look at the challenges in designing laws to regulate third party electoral activity, as a difficult line has to be drawn to ensure the laws are effective, while at the same time not imposing too many burdens on independent political activity. Moreover, the move to digital campaigning poses some further challenges, such as monitoring compliance by third party campaigners. While there are no simple solutions to some of the issues raised by third party electoral activity, this article will note some of the measures that could at least improve the transparency of such campaigning.     

Limited information and coordinated voting in multi-party elections under plurality rule: The role of campaigns

This essay bridges the logic of electoral coordination with the observation that many voters cannot recognize ex post viable candidates. When strategic voting is limited, behavioral factors of sincere voting play a large part in coordinating uninformed voters and inform the expectations of potentially strategic voters about the patterns of voting. Using the 2011 Canadian Election Survey, I found strong effects of the density of campaign contacts and the asymmetries in the campaigns spending and party identification on the predictability of the patterns of intra-district competition. A comparison of the effects of behavioral factors on the uninformed and informed voters confirms that the effect of centrifugal spending and party identification is conditional on the ability of voters to recognize the leaders of district competition.     

Money,candidates, and mayoral elections

In this paper, we extend a well-trod line of research from congressional and state-level elections—the electoral impact of campaign expenditures and candidate characteristics—to a relatively understudied context, urban mayoral elections. Using a sample of large U.S. cities, we provide evidence that mayoral elections are very similar to elections at other levels of office: there is a tremendous incumbency advantage, one that is overcome only with great effort; campaign spending is closely tied to incumbent vote share but it is challenger rather than incumbent spending that seems to drive outcomes; and challengers are hopelessly outspent. In addition, we find that the effect of local economic conditions on incumbent success is mediated by challenger spending and that incumbent candidates fare better in racially diverse settings.     

Investigating political marketing using mixed method: the case for campaign spending data

This article is a response to calls for new research methods in the study of political marketing. We submit that the mixed method approach to studying how political parties use opinion research and political communication is underused. More specifically we believe that campaign spending data, which are commonly analyzed in electoral studies, can become a significant source of information for the study of political marketing. We summarize the availability of electoral expenditure data in 13 established democracies before using a mixed method design to study political marketing management in Canada. We seek to validate quantitative data about marketing spending activity by administering semi‐structured interviews with practitioners who held senior campaign positions in major political parties. Our preliminary look at campaign finance through a political marketing scholarship lens reveals the strengths of drawing insights from such data but also some limitations. We conclude that, as other research has posited, Canadian political parties focus more on advertising in their approach to campaigning. More broadly, we propose that students of political marketing should balance proprietary interviews with transparent, standardized, replicable and objective sources of information such as campaign spending data, and vice‐versa. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Democracy and Education Spending in Africa

While it is widely believed that electoral competition influences public spending decisions, there has been relatively little effort to examine how recent democratization in the developing world has resulted in changes in basic service provision. There have been even fewer attempts to investigate whether democracy matters for public spending in the poorest developing countries, where "weak institutions" may mean that the formal adoption of electoral competition has little effect on policy. In this article I confront these questions directly, asking whether the shift to multiparty competition in African countries has resulted in increased spending on primary education. I develop an argument, illustrated with a game-theoretic model, which suggests that the need to obtain an electoral majority may have prompted African governments to spend more on education and to prioritize primary schools over universities within the education budget. I test three propositions from the model using panel data on electoral competition and education spending in African countries. I find clear evidence that democratically elected African governments have spent more on primary education, while spending on universities appears unaffected by democratization .     

Learning about Voter Rationality

An important empirical literature evaluates whether voters are rational by examining how electoral outcomes respond to events outside the control of politicians, such as natural disasters or economic shocks. The argument is that rational voters should not base electoral decisions on such events, so evidence that these events affect electoral outcomes is evidence of voter irrationality. We show that such events can affect electoral outcomes, even if voters are rational and have instrumental preferences. The reason is that these events change voters' opportunities to learn new information about incumbents. Thus, identifying voter (ir)rationality requires more than just identifying the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral fortunes. Our analysis highlights systematic ways in which electoral fortunes are expected to change in response to events outside incumbents' control. Such results can inform empirical work attempting to identify voter (ir)rationality.     

Who benefits? Intergovernmental transfers,subnational politics and local spending in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the intervening role that local political elites play to translate government transfers into effective public spending. We want to know whether mayors spend IGTs to provide basic public services or infrastructure works, and whether such investments are instrumental to secure their advantage as incumbents. To test these arguments, we use a combined dataset of local public finances between 2001 and 2015 and electoral results for the 2009 and 2014 municipal elections in Ecuador. We find that mayors do respond to political incentives and make strategic spending decisions to invest on public services and visible infrastructure projects. However, we find selective spending was insufficient to secure incumbency advantage in the 2014 election. We argue that the executive intervened to block or limit the impact of spending decisions at the local level, thus creating an incumbency disadvantage for mayors. Further research is needed to explain this.     

The Campaign Value of Incumbency: A New Solution to the Puzzle of Less Effective Incumbent Spending

A puzzle in research on campaign spending is that while expenditure is positively related to votes won, this effect is far more strongly, or even exclusively, enjoyed by challengers rather than by incumbents. We unearth a new explanation for the puzzle, focusing on the hidden, yet variable, campaign value of office perquisites which incumbents deploy in their campaigns to win votes. When these variable office benefits are unobserved, then the effect is to make observed incumbent spending less effective than spending by challengers. Using data from the 2002 Irish general election, where incumbency was assigned a variable campaign value and included in declared campaign spending, we are able to demonstrate this hidden incumbency effect and estimate its relationship to electoral success, in terms of overall votes, share of votes, and probability of winning a seat. Contrary to previous research showing ineffective incumbent spending, we find that when the campaign value of office is also measured, public office value “spending” is not only very effective in winning votes, but also seems to be more effective than regular incumbent spending.     

The Effect of Electoral Geography on Pork Barreling in Bicameral Legislatures

How does the electoral geography of legislative districts affect pork barreling? This article presents a formal model extending Mayhew's classic credit‐claiming theory to account for the electoral geography of bicameralism. Under bicameralism, upper chamber (Senate) and lower chamber (Assembly) legislators who share overlapping constituencies must collaborate to bring home pork projects. Collaboration is easier between a Senator and an Assembly Member who share a large fraction of their constituents and thus have relatively aligned electoral incentives. But dividing a Senate district into a larger number of Assembly district fragments misaligns these electoral incentives for collaboration, thus reducing equilibrium pork spending. Hence, increased Senate district fragmentation causes a decrease in equilibrium spending. I exploit the 2002 New York Senate expansion as a natural experiment, examining how sudden changes in the geographic fragmentation of Senate districts account for differences in the distribution of pork earmarks immediately before and after the redrawing of district boundaries.     

Clientelism and Political Participation: Case Study of the Chinese <Emphasis Type="Italic">tongxianghui</Emphasis> in Macao SAR Elections

This paper investigates the close connections between Chinese tongxianghui (Chinese native-place association) and electoral politics in Macao SAR Legislative Assembly’s direct elections. The findings show that the Chinese tongxianghui in Macao SAR adopt clientelist politics based on cultural affinities during the electoral politics in gaining their client-voter supports for the direct elections in 2009 and 2013. The nature of clientelist relationships, such as interest maximizing exchange, reciprocity and iteration, building up long term and stable relationships, are different from the electoral campaigns in Western liberal democracies which are usually center on ideological lines and occasional exchanges which are arguably too random and too anonymous. In essence, this study argues that Chinese tongxianghui in Macao SAR, notably the Fujian Jinjiang tongxianghui and Guangdong Jiangmen tongxianghui, constitute powerful electoral engineering with affiliated interest groups and they have built up stable and long term clientelist relations with their clients, instead of waging electoral battles on ideological lines. Thus, this study contends that Macao’s direct elections represent a unique case study about participation of Chinese tongxianghui in electoral politics which can be characterized as a form of local-level, cumulative and low political-risk clientelism which could be more effective than ideological politics.     

Vested Interests

SUMMARY

Interest groups are key players in contemporary campaigns and elections. Along with candidates and political parties, interest groups invest heavily in attempting to influence the outcomes of electoral contests, including presidential races. While scholars have investigated the resource allocation strategies of presidential candidates, little is known about how interest groups distribute resources in presidential campaigns. This study examines spending on political advertising in the 2000 presidential election and compares interest groups' resource allocation decisions to those of the candidates' organizations and the national political parties. The findings reveal that, although interest groups are numerous, disconnected and geographically dispersed, these entities—in the aggregate—adopt allocation strategies similar to those of candidates and parties.     

Are Campaign Contributions a Form of Speech? Evidence from Recent US House Elections

This paper investigates the effects of the sources ofcandidates' campaign funding on their electoral outcomes, withparticular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrowbase of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences. Anextensive dataset consisting of over 650,000 contributions toHouse candidates in elections from 1980 to 1992 is used. Theresults reveal a negative relationship between theconcentration of contributions and voteshare for open seatcandidates and challengers. This finding appears to havesignificant implications for some of the empirical premisesunderlying the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Buckley v.Valeo decision. At the very least, it represents an importantstylized fact about US elections that is robust over 1980–1992 period.     

Accountable or Untouchable? Electoral accountability in Romanian local elections

While retrospective models of voting posit that voters should “vote the rascals out”, a wave of recent research has found that this is rarely the case. We investigate this question in a context in which many sitting politicians have recently been indicted on corruption charges – the municipal level in Romania, a surprisingly under-researched case in this sub-field. Romania provides a good case for electoral accountability. Not only do Romanians deeply detest corruption, the party system also contains many parties that would make it easy for voters to switch from a corrupt to a cleaner alternative. We collected an original data register of electoral and socio-political data on roughly 3200 localities together with all cases of corruption charges published by the Romanian anti-corruption agency, the Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie (DNA), accounting for magnitude and timing of the scandal as well as the judicial outcome for the indicted mayor. In all, we find that 81 sitting mayors elected in 2012 were charged with corruption prior to the 2016 election. We test the electoral impact of corruption on the incumbent mayors on four outcomes indicating electoral accountability commonly used in the literature – retirement, vote share compared to the previous election, voter turnout, and reelection using difference and difference and a pairwise matching designs, inter alia. The results show that Romanians do punish their corrupt incumbent mayors to a quite high extent compared to the clean mayors. However, due to the large vote margins, the punishment is not severe enough to make them lose more often than similar “clean‟ mayors, although they tend to not run for re-election at much higher rates. Turnout is unaffected by corruption at the municipal level. In line with previous results, we thus find a certain amount of electoral accountability, but not to the extent that the ‘rascals are thrown out’.