The heterogeneous price of a vote: Evidence from multiparty systems, 1993–2017

Abstract

What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993-2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates' vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates' party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter. * We gratefully acknowledge the many helpful comments and suggestions from Micael Castanheira,

Minimum Wages and Voting: Assessing the Political Returns to Redistribution Outside the Tax System

“…Another is the possibility that voters misattribute policy responsibility to incumbents (of whatever party), consistent with the work of Cole et al (2012) and Bagues and Esteve-Volart (2016) in decidedly di↵erent contexts than the present. A third is that, ceteris paribus, voters would reward Democrats, but, that there also exists a simultaneous neutralizing e↵ect of political contributions to Republicans by anti-minimum wage business interests, something consistent with the importance of political spending as an additional channel of influence (Bombardini and Trebbi, 2011;Bekkouche et al, 2022;Broberg et al, 2022). In the paper, I show that the evidence is not consistent with any of these three alternative explanations.…”

“…Another possible explanation for the null vote share result is inspired by the literature studying the e↵ect of money in politics (Bombardini and Trebbi, 2011;Bekkouche et al, 2022;Broberg et al, 2022). It is well known that many businesses that rely on minimum wage-level workers oppose minimum wage laws.…”

Spending Limits, Public Funding, and Election Outcomes

“…4 While most of the literature focuses on the distinction between challengers and incumbents, differences across orientations may be even more important. Because left-wing candidates tend to rely less on private donations (Bekkouche et al, 2022), they stand to benefit more from public funding than candidates on the right. Our results confirm this prediction.…”

“…For recent papers measuring the effect of campaign spending on vote shares outside the U.S., see for instanceBen-Bassat et al (2015),François et al (2022), andBekkouche et al (2022).4 Section 6.1 discusses the difference between the effects found in municipal and departmental elections at greater length. These results complement the vast literature studying the impact of differences across voting systems (e.g.,Myerson and Weber, 1993;Eggers, 2015;Bordignon et al, 2016).…”

Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates

“…Denter and Sisak (2015) show that campaign spending may strategically respond to past results, for instance from polls, and there is comprehensive evidence that higher expenditures and advertising can increase vote shares (e.g., da Silveira and deMello, 2011;Spenkuch and Toniatti, 2018;Bekkouche and Cage, 2022).22 All data come from the CNCCFP. Data on campaign expenditures for recent years are available in a digital format on the Commission's website (http://www.cnccfp.fr/index.php?art=584).…”