What happens when a traditional source of political capital becomes health hazard? Stigmatized electoral practices, such as vote buying, are double-edged sword: While these strategies may signal candidates’ strength, they also entail reputational costs. In normal times, street campaigns non-stigmatized practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic, however, imposed risks. Employing data from national ...

This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of the public agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition compete in elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience to an issue implies proposing an innovative policy proposal alternative to the status-quo. Parties trade off the issues with high salience i...

In authoritarian regimes election polls can be vastly polluted by measurement error, namely the social desirability bias, which can contribute to substantial inflation in the publicized estimates of an autocrat’s electoral support and voter turnout. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the magnitude of social desirability bias in polling estimates released before and after the 2012 Russi...

A puzzle in research on campaign spending is that while expenditure is positively related to votes won, this effect is far more strongly, or even exclusively, enjoyed by challengers rather than by incumbents. We unearth a new explanation for the puzzle, focusing on the hidden, yet variable, campaign value of office perquisites which incumbents deploy in their campaigns to win votes. When these ...

Selecting between two candidates during a campaign is a crucial first step toward political involvement: an individual who does not select a preferred political candidate is unlikely to take political action. Can negative campaign ads help individuals make these electoral choices? Empirical evidence on this topic has been mixed. Some argue that negativity can increase the likelihood of choice. ...

This paper uses the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) to identify the causal impact of money in elections. Estimates consistently suggest that the Buckley-induced removal of state limits on campaign spending led to increased Republican voteshares, increased Republican candidate entry, and decreased Democratic candidate entry in state legislative and gubernatorial elections in st...

Scholars of political elite behavior have documented a strong link between gender and social policy focus among politicians. In the electoral, legislative, and governmental arena, female politicians give higher priority to social policy matters. While this gender gap is well-documented, it is less well understood. Using measures of campaign issue emphasis as a dependent variable, this paper tes...

Political parties use marketing instruments as part of their electoral campaign activities. These are usually analysed and categorised using the 4P and marketing mix concept, a perspective anchored in the ‘managerial’ school of marketing theory. However, these concepts have come under considerable criticism. This article uses an alternative perspective, i.e. a functional analysis, to describe t...

terms of both its causes and its consequences. Chapter 3 discusses a variety of conditions that lead to a market for votes, including the availability of cost-efficient alternatives to vote buying. In this chapter, I explore a few of the political and institutional factors that can make vote buying a more or less attractive strategy for parties and candidates vis-à-vis some of these alternative...