Money matters in party-centered politics: campaign spending in Korean congressional elections

Does candidates' advertising spending help winning?

“…Second, the estimates of the PAD with respect to VOT range from 0.47 to 1.81 for incumbents and from 1.35 to 2.89 for challengers except for those incumbents in models 9 and 10, and the sizes of the estimates indicate that challengers' expenditures may have a greater impact than incumbents' expenditures. This finding is consistent with the case of the US presidential election (Nagler and Leighley 1992) or the case of congressional elections in the US (Erikson and Palfrey 2000) as well as Korea (Shin et al 2005). Finally, similar to the overall sample, most of the media effect is characterized by a negative impact on vote shares except in the case of television advertising.…”

“…In a way, that is different from the above arguments regarding the presidential effect; while the legislative candidates belong to the same party as the mayor in their own electoral districts, such relationships can generate a clearly positive shock on a vote increase. 14 This result is similar to that of Shin et al (2005), who point out that when a candidate runs in a district that lies in a region where their party leader was born, they tend to have a major advantage in the election. Among the remaining regressors as shown by the interaction terms, it is found that, inconsistent with the past findings proposed by West (1995), political advertising will harm vote shares involving higher educated people as reported by the parameter PAD×EDU.…”

“…Stevenson and Vavreck (2000) reached a similar conclusion that it was economic performance and not the campaign spending that had a stronger impact on party vote shares. On the other hand, there were also scholars who rejected these previous arguments and, contrary to most existing studies, found that campaign expenditures had a strong effect on the outcome of elections (see, inter alia, Nagler and Leighley 1992, Shin et al 2005, Artés and Viñuela 2007. In other words, no consensus was reached on this topic in spite of these numerous studies in the early literature.…”

“…2 By contrast, unlike Dalager (1996), Shin et al (2005), Stratmann (2006) and Jacobson (2006), who use the total level of campaign spending as an anchor for their advertising efforts, we use the per eligible voter advertising spending for each candidate to analyze its impact on the election results. 3 The other relative issues are discussed in Asian countries like Korea (Lee 1993), Japan (Hiwatari 2005), and Singapore (Rodan 1997).…”

Democratization Effects of Campaign Contribution Limits in Gubernatorial Elections

“…In all analyses, there was no statistical basis to suggest the need to include interaction terms which would have been indicative of a differential effect of contribution limits upon incumbents and challengers. 28 This stream of argument can be applied not only to candidate-centered politics, but also to party-centered politics where money has an importance in elections, such as Great Britain (Pattie et al, 1995) and Korea (Shin et al, 2005).…”