Incumbency advantage and political campaign spending limits

Campaign Spending Limits and Political Advertising

T research on political campaigns has focused on the positioning of parties and not on how parties communicate with the electorate. We construct a model where two parties fund both the “creative” and “media” elements of political advertising and examine how campaign budgets affect advertising strategies in the context of a political campaign. Our key finding is that tight campaign limits stimul...

Campaign Spending and Incumbency: An Alternative Simultaneous Equations Approach

This paper estimates the effects of incumbent spending and challenger spending in U.S. House elections in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper employs FIML simultaneous equations analysis involving instrumental variables as vote predictors, and zero-covariance restrictions for the vote-spending disturbances. This procedure allows the estimation of spending effects given plausible assumptions about th...

Political Dynasties and the Incumbency Advantage in Party - Centered Environments ∗

What explains the perpetuation of political dynasties in democracies? A handful of recent investigations using data from the United States and other candidatecentered electoral environments have pointed to a causal effect of incumbency on dynasty formation. However, dynasties exist in party-centered environments as well—and, importantly, the causal mechanisms underlying their formation may diff...

Campaign Spending Limits, Incumbent Spending, and Election Outcomes

We study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in Canadian federal elections. We first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates. We then use this information to produce endogeneity-corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares. Furthermore, we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of elec...

Constituency Service and Incumbency Advantage