The Effects of Campaign Spending in House Elections: New Evidence for Old Arguments

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.…”

The relative electoral impact of central party co-ordination and size of party membership at constituency level

“…Over the past decade, the role and impact of constituency campaigning in British States (see, for example : Crotty, 1971;Jacobson, 1980Jacobson, , 1990 but have also challenged what was previously the received wisdom put forward, for example, by various 'Nuffield' studies -that only national campaigning is significant and that efforts at local level are meaningless rituals -and what was once a 'revisionist' position has now come to be widely accepted. That said, there have been differences between the three teams, not only in methodology but also in their conclusions about whether local campaigning 'works' for all of the major parties.…”

Campaign Duration and Election Outcomes

“…Consistent with previous work, we adopt a dichotomous categorization for challenger quality [4]; admittedly, a more refined measure of quality would have been preferable, however this was unavailable. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated such dichotomous conceptualizations of challenger quality to be quite robust and very highly correlated with alternative, more refined measures of quality [7]. Accordingly, we consider challengers with prior elective experience to be high-quality challengers while those with no prior elective office are low-quality.…”

“…On this score, researchers have been somewhat equivocal. Some [5][6][7][8] argue that spending by challengers is more effective than spending by incumbents, perhaps reflecting the relative obscurity of challengers. Others [9][10][11][12] find incumbent and challenger spending to have similar effects, with challengers enjoying a smaller edge in spending efficiency than suggested initially by Jacobson [5].…”

“…Specifically, we use lagged incumbent spending as an instrument for current incumbent spending in two-stage least squares analyses. To be consistent with previous work in this field, we also adopt the following conventions: first, we convert all spending figures to 2006 dollars; as in previous studies, a log transformation of campaign spending (in thousands of 2006 dollars) is used to simulate diminishing marginal returns; to make this assumption less drastic, $5,000 is added to all candidate expenditure levels (see [7] for details). A similar transformation was performed on the incumbent spending instrument (incumbent spending in the previous campaign).…”