How prices matter in politics: the returns to campaign advertising

Abstract

Campaign advertising, Campaign spending,

Resource allocation and voter calculus in a multicandidate election

“…2 The relevant question is not whether campaigning is a sort of game theoretic "prisoner's dilemma" wherein both candidates could save time and money by refraining from active campaigning, but whether either candidate would find it advantageous unilaterally to abandon all campaign expenditures. As shown empirically by Stratmann (2009), television advertising has a non-negligible effect on voting behavior. Thus, the relationship between candidate expenditure and voter calculus is worthy of examination.…”

“…13 The Wisconsin Advertising Project catalogues the major attributes of every political advertisement aired during the 2003-2004 United States election cycle pertaining to gubernatorial and national elections. As shown by Stratmann (2009), television advertising has a marked impact on voter behavior and is therefore a reasonable proxy for variable campaign spending designed to increase political support.…”

Mind the Gap? Political Advertisements and Congressional Election Results

“…While campaign expenditures improve the accuracy of these traditional models, when scholars try to isolate specific campaign effects, total expenditures is a poor proxy (Goldstein and Ridout 2004;Huber and Arceneaux 2007;Stratmann 2004). There are two criticisms of using total campaign expenditures as a proxy for television advertisements.…”

Voter response to congressional campaigns: new techniques for analyzing aggregate electoral behavior

“…5 Jacobson (1978Jacobson ( , 1990 and Krasno (1988, 1990) debated this topic. Milyo (1998) and Basinger and Ensley (2007) weighed in more recently, finding more evidence of tepid incumbent spending effects in House elections, but Stratmann (2009) attributes this result to failing to control for differential costs of campaign advertising. we can depict these three quantities as an equilateral triangle, and we can depict any congressional election's results as a point that lies along or inside the borders of the triangle.…”