Rebuttal to Jacobson's "New Evidence for Old Arguments"

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org..

Does Political Advertising Persuade?

“…More to the point, airing additional advertisements should increase a candidate's share of the vote, but candidates generally air the most advertisements in races in which they face stiff competition, the closest races. This concern in the search for advertising effects is similar to the problem confronting those seeking to estimate the effects of congressional spending (e.g., Green & Krasno, 1990, 1988Jacobson, 1990). To account for this, we included lagged dependent variables (in other words, the value of the dependent variable in wave 2) as predictors in all models.…”

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

“…An exclusion restriction is a variable that impacts the endogenous variable (campaign spending) but does not have impact the outcome variable (vote proportion). We utilize Lagged Republican Expenditures and Lagged Democratic Expenditures (see Green and Krasno 1990;Bartels 1991;Gerber 1998) as exclusion restrictions in both the Republican Incumbent and Democratic Incumbent models. Lagged spending by the incumbent is usually justified on the grounds that it accounts for a candidate's ability and proclivity to raise funds, after controlling for likelihood of success (see, however, Milyo 1998).…”

Why Do Experienced Challengers Do Better than Amateurs?

“…The relationship is so regular that political experience has become the standard observable indication of candidate quality. 3 Even though scholars disagree on the correct way to operationalize it (e.g., Green and Krasno 1990;Jacobson 1990), most scholars writing on the topic agree that most candidates who stand the best chance of defeating an incumbent have held elective office prior to running (though see Canon 1990;Roberds and Roberts 2002).…”