Campaign Cost and Electoral Accountability

Abstract

The increasing cost of political campaigns and its impact on the electoral process are issues of paramount importance in modern democracies. We propose a theory of electoral accountability in which candidates choose whether or not to commit to constituency service and whether or not to pay a campaign cost to advertise their platform. A higher campaign cost decreases voter welfare when partisan imbalance is low. However, when partisan imbalance is high, a higher campaign cost is associated with a higher expected level of constituency service. More costly campaigns can thus have a rebalancing effect that improves electoral accountability. We discuss the implications of our findings for campaign finance regulation and present empirical evidence consistent with our key predictions.

Electoral Imbalances and Their Consequences

“…While Prato and Wolton (2016a) are the first to adapt this modeling approach to electoral campaigns, their analysis of the relationship between voter interest in politics and attention to campaigns assumes perfect symmetry between candidates, and is thus completely silent about the role of electoral imbalances, as well as the resulting empirical implications. Other models of electoral campaigns are unidirectional: with either candidates informing voters (e.g., Prat, 2002;Coate, 2004;Ashworth, 2006;Dewan and Hortala-Vallve, 2016;Prato and Wolton, 2016b) or voters learning about candidates (e.g., Martinelli, 2006;Svolik, 2013;Hortala-Vallve and Larcinese, 2016).…”