campaign spending and senate elections 1978 84 this paper uses a sample of recent senate election results and estimates vote equations that show challenger spending hurts and incumbent spending helps incumbent re election while both types of spending have diminishing returns the effects are asymmetrical challenger spending is more productive at lower levels of spending but incumbents can spend greater amounts more profitably than can challengers these results can explain why senate incumbents spend money why they typically outspend their challenger and why incumbents who can outspend their challenger would tend to be against spending limits or public financing

selling favors in the lab experiments on campaign finance reform campaign advertising can provide benefits to constituencies when used to fund the distribution of useful information but voters can be harmed if candidates finance such advertising by trading policy favors to special interests in exchange for contributions we report data from novel laboratory campaign finance experiments that shed light on this tradeoff and that provide rigorous empirical evidence on formal campaign finance theory our key finding is that voters respond to advertising differently between special interest and publicly financed campaigns and that the nature of this difference is qualitatively consistent with formal models predictions

how words and money cultivate a personal vote the effect of legislator credit claiming on constituent credit allocation the district affect how constituents allocate credit legislators use credit claiming messages to influence the expenditures they receive credit for and to affect how closely they are associated with spending in the district constituents are responsive to credit claiming messages they build more support than other nonpartisan messages but contrary to expectations from other studies constituents are more responsive to the total number of messages sent rather than the amount claimed our results have broad implications for political representation the personal vote and the study of u s congressional elections p articularistic spending a large literature argues cultivates a personal vote for incumbents cain ferejohn and fiorina 1987 ferejohn 1974 lazarusandreiley2010 levittandsnyder1997 mayhew 1974 to build this support legislators are assumed to direct projects and programs to their districts constituents in turn are thought to reward their legislator for the level of federal spending in the district levitt and snyder 1997 str omberg 2004 or the

evolutionary theorizing in economics modern economic analysis oriented toward understanding the workings of economies that make extensive use of markets came into existence with three guiding questions all central in adam smith s 1776 1937 the wealth of nations one question concerned order without any central authority guiding and commanding action how is economic activity coordinated the second question was the challenge of explaining the prevailing constellation of prices inputs and outputs what explains the price of labor and the rent of land the third question addressed the processes of economic progress or development smith and other early economists clearly were impressed by the inventiveness the energy and the growing productivity generated by the evolving market economy how to understand its dynamics the first two questions have defined continuing central concerns of the discipline of economics since they first were posed over two centuries ago when not posed in the context of an economy that is understood as in the process of developing they seem to pull the focus of theorizing toward equilibrium conditions the third question concerned with the processes driving economic progress pulls the theorizing toward an evolutionary orientation the question of economic development has waxed and waned in centrality to the discipline as has the importance of evolutionary theorizing during the first several decades of the twentieth century evolutionary thinking and language was widespread in economics but as one contrasts the economic

estimating the effect of campaign spending on senate election outcomes using instrumental variables o examine the traditional view that challenger spending is more effective than incumbent spending 7 i reestimate the effects of spending using instrumental variables that affect a candidate s ability to raise campaign funds such as candidate wealth levels hhen the endogeneity of candidate spending levels is properly taken into account the marginal effects of incumbent and challenger spending are roughly equal in contrast to previous research showing that because of higher marginal returns to challenger spending the incumbent s spending advantage cannot explain high incumbent reelection rates this article shows that in an average senate election the incumbent s spending advantage yields a 6 increase in the incumbent s vote share that incumbent spending wins elections has direct implications regarding the consequences of campaign finance reform my findings imply that equalizing spending levels may significantly increase incumbent defeat rates and caps on candidate spending may improve the chances of challengers in american congressional elections incumbents routinely win reelection even in the 1994 republican landslide change in the partisan makeup of congress occurred mainly through open seats switching from the democrats to the republicans a common explanation for high congressional reelection rates is the large campaign spending advantage enjoyed by incumbents it is widely believed that challenger spending is very important but there is surprisingly little evidence in the academic literature that incumbent campaign spending has an important effect on congressional election outcomes in light of the substantial effort incumbents devote to fundraising as well as some nagging methodological questions about existing academic studies the effect of incumbent spending on election outcomes remains an unresolved issue accurately measuring how incumbent spending leads to votes is of obvious importance politicians want to win elections and so if money matters then this will influence their behavior if campaign spending effects are trivial then concerns about politicians being

a status based model of market competition this article explores the significance of status processes for generating and reproducing hierarchy among producers in a market it develops a conception of a market as a status order in which each

an individual level multiequation model of expenditure effects in contested house elections e shall address questions concerning the impact of candidate spending in congressional elections in a new way we develop a multiequation model of congressional vote choice a v that takes the endogeneity of expenditures into account we then estimate both this model and the more traditional single equation model using individual level survey data the substantial differences we find between the two models indicates that the simultaneity bias present in the single equation model is not trivial the challenger and incumbent expenditure terms are each significant whereas only challenger expenditures are in the single equation setup and of much greater magnitude in the multiequation case in addition we evaluate hypotheses grounded in persuasive communications theory concerning the type of individuals most affected by the messages emanating from the campaigns we find that individuals with higher education those with greater interest in campaigns and those with strongly held convictions are unaffected by candidate spending whereas individuals lacking each of these attributes are greatly influenced by campaign expenditures

election goals and the allocation of campaign resources this paper compares the equilibrium behavior and outcomes in a model of two party competition for legislative seats under two different assumptions about the parties goals 1 parties maximize the expected number of seats won and 2 parties maximize the probability of winning a majority of the seats the two goals may lead to qualitatively different behavior and studying the differences yields insights into the relationship between the goals and the role of assymetries between the parties

developing technological capabilities in agro industry ghana s experience with fresh pineapple exports abstract this article examines the emergence and trajectory of a new agro industry in ghana the pineapple export industry using the technological capabilities approach it explains the limited expansion of the industry and its declining competitiveness in the face of new competition by looking at how ghanaian exporters developed technological capabilities initially and the incentives and disincentives to building on those capabilities the article argues that at the heart of the industry s crisis was an inability to further develop technological capabilities the crisis had systemic features that have broader implications for developing new agro industries in ghana as well as other african countries

international coordination in the design of macroeconomic policy rules abstract the paper examines international issues that arise in the design and evaluation of macroeconomic policy rules it begins with a theoretical investigation of the effects of fiscal and monetary policy in a two country rational expectations model with staggered wage and price setting and with perfect capital mobility the results indicate that with the appropriate choice of policies and with flexible exchange rates demand shocks need not give rise to international externalities or coordination issues price shocks however do create an externality and this is the focus of the empirical part of the paper using a simple seven country model consisting of canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states optimal cooperative and non cooperative nash policy rules to minimize the variance of output and inflation in each country are calculated the cooperative policies are computed using standard dynamic stochastic programming techniques and the non cooperative policies are computed using an algorithm developed by finn kydland the central result is that the cooperative policy rules for these countries are more accommodative to inflation than the non cooperative policy rules

economics and policy preferences causal evidence of the impact of economic conditions on support for redistribution and other ballot proposals abstract using california ballot proposition returns and exogenous shifts to labor demand we provide the first large scale causal evidence of the impact of economic conditions on policy preferences consistent with economic theory we find that positive economic shocks decrease support for redistributive policies more notably we find evidence of a need for cognitive consistency in voting behavior as economic shocks have a smaller significant impact on voting on noneconomic ballot issues while we also demonstrate that positive shocks decrease turnout we present evidence that our results reflect changes in the electorate s preferences and not simply to its composition

some talk money in politics a partial review of the literature the financing of political campaigns is an area of active scholarly study i review some of the recent literature and discuss important methodological issues that arise in empir ical research on campaign expenditures and campaign contributions the effects of campaign expenditures and advertising on candidate and ballot measure elections are summarized as are the impacts of contributions on contributors welfare many states have changed their campaign finance laws in the past few years and i describe work that exploits variations in these laws a discussion of the strategies used by interest groups to allocate their campaign contributions provides insights into contributors motives

political advertising and election results we study the persuasive effects of political advertising our empirical strategy exploits fcc regulations that result in plausibly exogenous variation in the number of impressions across the borders of neighboring counties applying this approach to detailed data on television advertisement broadcasts and viewership patterns during the 2004 12 presidential campaigns our results indicate that total political advertising has almost no impact on aggregate turnout by contrast we find a positive and economically meaningful effect of advertising on candidates vote shares taken at face value our estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in the partisan difference in advertising raises the partisan difference in vote shares by about 0 5 percentage points evidence from a regression discontinuity design suggests that advertising affects election results by altering the partisan composition of the electorate

selection and influence interest groups and congressional voting on trade policy studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote we depart from that strategy in several ways we define interest groups at the level of standard industrial classification two digit codes and observe the universe of interests for 1979 90 we use measures of geographically and nongeographically based economic interests to estimate the representative s party and ideology we also consider the factor endowments of individuals within a district to examine their impact on floor votes we then investigate the influence of these interests on members party affiliation and ideology as well as a pool of five floor votes on foreign trade using instrumental variables for party and ideology economic interests account for a substantial portion of the variance in all cases and models that also include other explanatory variables are highly accurate in estimating floor votes

a natural experiment in proposal power and electoral success does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the canadian house of commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes the right of noncabinet members to propose legislation is assigned by lottery comparing outcomes between those who were granted the right to propose and those who were not we show that incumbents of the governing party enjoy a 2 7 percentage point bonus in vote total in the election following their winning the right to introduce a single piece of legislation which translates to a 7 increase in the probability of winning the causal effect results from higher likeability among constituents these results demonstrate experimentally that what politicians do as lawmakers has a causal effect on electoral outcomes

equilibria in campaign spending games theory and data we present a formal game theoretic model to explain the simultaneity problem that makes it difficult to obtain unbiased estimates of the effects of both incumbent and challenger spending in u s house elections the model predicts a particular form of correlation between the expected closeness of the race and the level of spending by both candidates which implies that the simultaneity problem should not be present in close races and should be progressively more severe in the range of safe races that are empirically observed this is confirmed by comparing simple ols regression of races that are expected to be close with races that are not using house incumbent races spanning two decades

money and votes reconsidered congressional elections 1972 1982 the evolution of congressional campaign finance over the past decade is characterized by steady growth in campaign spending and other notable changes in campaign finance practices the main purpose of the research reported here was to determine whether these changes have altered the effects of campaign spending on election outcomes this required reexamination of auxiliary questions concerning how sending effects operate and can be measured it also required facing the limits of what analysis of aggregate campaign spending data can tell us about money in elections replication of ols and 2sls analyses of campaign spending effects produced solidly consistent results over the six congressional elections held between 1972 and 1982 taken at face value the evidence is overwhelming that the challenger s level of spending has a strong impact on the vote whereas that of the incumbent has virtually no impact at all but the evidence remains open to doubt on two grounds one is the probable inadequacy of the 2sls model or perhaps any possible model leaving the issue of simultaneity bias unsettled if bias remains the estimates exaggerate the electoral effects of the challenger s campaign expenditures the issue cannot be resolved with more of the same data but rather requires data of a different sort surveys taken over the course of a sample of campaigns would do the trick meanwhile i think it would be foolish to make policy on the assumption that bias is in fact substantial the greatest likelihood remains that restrictions on campaign money will have the general effect of hurting challengers jacobson 1979 the other doubtful albeit equally stable finding is that incumbents do not gain votes by spending in campaigns no incumbent seems to believe it and there is at least circumstantial evidence from for example the 1982 elections that their skepticism is quite justified if so the problem lies in the limits of what aggregate data of the kind analyzed here can tell us few incumbents do not spend heavily when they are strongly challenged if both candidates spend beyond the point needed to become thoroughly familiar to voters then the substance of the campaigns the contents of campaign messages become the dominant factors incumbents may need to spend money in order to change the message as new circumstances arise to frame new issues that would help them most or damage them least to win the battle of establishing the real issues like nonincumbents sitting members may sometimes need to spend beyond a certain threshold to remain competitive but nearly all of them do so when the necessity arises so aggregate spending data are largely uninformative how the money is spent rather than how much is what matters the two most notable developments in congressional campaign finance have opposing implications national party organizations particularly the republican have assumed an increasingly important role in financing campaigns greater central control leads to a more efficient distribution of the party s collective campaign resources which among other things promises to raise the overall level of electoral competition it also leads to more coordinated campaigning with greater emphasis on national themes and programs thus it should foster more cooperation and loyalty among fellow partisans in congress but pacs have also grown in numbers and in financial importance because most concentrate on gaining access to incumbents they do little to make elections more competitive because they usually pursue narrowly defined interests their influence fragments the congress and weakens party coalitions in this and other ways parties and pacs are natural rivals the most consequential decisions taken in the next round in campaign finance policy will be those which affect the relative importance of parties and pacs see u s congress 1984 for comments on this and other current campaign finance issues

a new approach to measure tactical voting evidence from the british elections although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences in this article we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results this approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies we show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election mainly for liberal democratic voters supporting labour moreover our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes we also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting

campaign finance reform a public choice perspective the federal election campaign act as passed in 1971 and amended in 1974represented landmark federal legislation it imposed new restrictions oncampaign contributions and contained path breaking provisions for the useof public funds to partially finance the campaigns of qualifyingpresidential candidates the nominal intent of the legislation was torestrain the skyrocketing campaign costs and the feared abuses thatgrowing dependencies on such money engendered three decades later withthe campaign spending arms race still raging congress sought toimpose further constraints on campaign spending with enactment of thebipartisan campaign reform act of 2002 bcra competing theories ofgovernment regulation are reviewed to better understand the intent andlikely consequences of the 2002 legislation in particular and campaignfinance regulation in general a simple model of the campaign spendingprocess highlights the likely causes of the rapid growth in campaignspending data and evidence are presented to test hypotheses concerningthe timing of and underlying motivations for bcra

campaign spending limits and political advertising traditionally 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 stimulate aggressive advertising on the part of competing parties while generous budgets often lead to parties acting defensively the analysis also provides an explanation for the increasingly partisan campaigns that the republicans and democrats have taken in recent elections when there is significant polarization amongst noncommitted voters and campaign spending limits are higher we find that parties retrench toward traditional constituencies

electoral contributions and the cost of unpopularity when considering electoral campaigns candidates receiving contributions from relatively unpopular industries should be regarded less favorably by voters that have information on the sources of funding to offset this unpopularity effect politicians may either demand more money for campaign advertising from these industries in order to persuade less informed voters or shy away from unpopular contributors to avoid losing the support of the informed electorate our model predicts that the first effect dominates and electoral contributions are increasing in industry unpopularity by using u s house elections data and different identification strategies we provide robust evidence in favor of our predictions jel d72 p16

creating and maintaining global connections agro business and the precarious making of fresh cut markets abstract this article reconstructs the evolution of a multinational fruit processing company from ghana starting from the perspective that firms more generally aim at achieving stability in intra and extra organisational relations the article explores the practical means organisational forms resources technologies strategies and routines through which the case study company achieved relational stability in global markets but also shows how this was eroded in changing market environments extending out from this case study the article also addresses the questions why some agro business firms in africa have developed more sophisticated high value market connections while others have not and whether foreign direct investments can serve as catalysts for agro industrialisation

campaign allocations under probabilistic voting we develop a probabilistic voting model where candidates compete by advertising in different media markets ads are viewed by everyone within a market and cannot be targeted to subgroups such as one candidate s partisans candidates estimate the distribution of voter preference intensities in a market and campaign ads then shift this distribution individuals with any intensity vote with some probability for each candidate we derive comparative static implications of changes in a variety of factors on the advertising decisions of each candidate using campaign advertising data from 2002 we find these results to be consistent with actual campaign allocation behavior

solving for optimal simple rules in rational expectations models this paper presents algorithms that solve for optimal simple monetary policy rules in rational expectations models with precommitment and discretion the algorithms are applied to the models in fuhrer j money credit banking 29 1997 214 clarida et al j econ lit 37 1999 1661 and rudebusch econ j 112 2002 402 to examine the efficiency properties of operational policy rules we show that optimized taylor type rules preform well in these models but that aside from the fuhrer moore model this result is sensitive to whether the central bank can respond to current period shocks taylor type rules that are operational in the sense that they do not respond to current period information are found to be highly inefficient in the rudebusch model and in the clarida et al 1999 model

an experimental study of alternative campaign finance systems transparency donations and policy choices we experimentally study the transparency effect of alternative campaign finance systems on donations election outcomes policy choices and welfare three alternatives are considered one where donors preferences and donations are unobserved by the candidate and public one where they are observed by the candidate but not the public and one where they are observed by all we label them full anonymity fa partial anonymity pa and no anonymity na respectively we find that in na and pa candidates consistently respond to donations by choosing policies favoring the donors fa in contrast is the most successful in limiting the influence of donations on policy choices donors benefit greatly from the possibility of donations whereas social welfare may be harmed in some treatments to our knowledge this article is the first to investigate the effect of different campaign finance systems distinguished by their transparency level jel d72

learning adjustment and economic development transforming firms the state and associations in chile abstract this article views learning processes as key to successful economic adjustment it discusses results of research conducted in chile focused on the agroindustry and footwear sectors it identifies specific problems that large and small firms face to upgrade production and stresses the limits of focusing exclusively on market reforms for achieving growth the article discusses how institutions reshape to facilitate learning and improve performance in chile particularly the relations between firms the reorientation of trade associations and the state s role as facilitator of collective learning processes

advertising effects in presidential elections presidential elections provide both an important context in which to study advertising and a setting that mitigates the challenges of dynamics and endogeneity we use the 2000 and 2004 general elections to analyze the effect of market level advertising on county level vote shares the results indicate significant positive effects of advertising exposures both instrumental variables and fixed effects alter the ad coefficient advertising elasticities are smaller than are typical for branded goods yet significant enough to shift election outcomes for example if advertising were set to zero and all other factors held constant three states electoral votes would have changed parties in 2000 given the narrow margin of victory in 2000 this shift would have resulted in a different president

campaign contributions as investments the u s house of representatives 1980 1986 this paper treats the market for special interest campaign contributions and political favors as a simple asset market the model yields a simple equilibrium relationship among three variables the total amount of investor contributions a candidate receives the monetary value of the favors he has promised and his probability of winning using data on open seat races for the u s house of representatives i confront the model with a series of tests despite the starkness of the model the results of these tests are highly supportive

comparing the global performance of alternative exchange arrangements abstract this paper presents and applies a methodology useful for studying the operating characteristics of a number of alternative monetary arrangements using a large scale simulation model of the world economy we consider the performance of the regimes when policymakers do or do not observe the shocks and when policymakers infer the shocks using an optimal filtering rule although the results are model specific and at best illustrative of the issues involved the approach does have the advantage of providing a richer framework of analysis than is possible in simple models of international interdependence

campaign finance and voter welfare with entrenched incumbents two candidates compete for elective office each candidate has information she would like to reveal to the voters but this requires costly advertising the candidates can solicit contributions from interest groups to finance such advertising these contributions are secured by promises to perform favors for the contributors should the candidate win the election voters understand this and elect the candidate they like best taking into account their expectations about promises to special interests there is an incumbency advantage in fundraising which is sometimes so great that the incumbent faces no serious opposition at all introducing partial public financing through matching funds improves voter welfare in districts that have advertising under the decentralized system while it can reduce welfare in other districts the optimal policy must strike a balance between these two effects

why is there so little money in u s politics in this paper we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy buying but are rather a form of political participation and consumption we summarize the data on campaign spending and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals not special interests are the main source of campaign contributions moreover we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good dependent upon income and campaign contributions as a percent of gdp have not risen appreciably in over 100 years if anything they have probably fallen we then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators votes finally we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects there is little relationship between money and legislator votes thus the question is not why there is so little money politics but rather why organized interests give at all we conclude by offering potential answers to this question this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

negative campaigning in a probabilistic voting model this paper extends the small existing theoretical literature on negative campaigning building on work by harrington and hess games econ behav 17 209 229 1996 while their analysis explores the determinants of negative campaign spending using a classic spatial voting model this paper relies instead on a probabilistic voting model extending the use of this popular model to a new setting the main lesson of the analysis is that negative campaign spending is higher for the relatively more centrist candidate the more extreme candidate in the electoral contest devotes by contrast comparatively more of her funds to positive campaign spending this result which at first appears unrelated to the main findings of harrington and hess games econ behav 17 209 229 1996 and chakrabarti scottish j polit econ 54 136 149 2007 actually can be viewed as aligning with their conclusions although the underlying mechanics are very different the paper also offers an empirical test of this prediction

money and votes a simultaneous equation model this paper has specified and estimated a model of the interaction between money and voting in american politics convincingly establishing the identification of a system of equations can be difficult even when theory provides a guide in the study of money in politics however no theoretical perspective has been established in the literature to make the case for identification as unambiguous as possible this paper has done two things first the specification was based in part on theory which has formally been developed elsewhere and which satisfactorily describes data at the economic interest group level welch 1980 second part of the question of identification revolves around the relationship between party strength and socioeconomic variables because there are questions as to the best measurement of party strength results based on two measures were presented for a number of reasons the presidential vote was the preferred measure this study draws four conclusions first money influenced voting in u s house elections in 1972 although its effect was small second patterns of total contributions to a u s house candidate are consistent with the hypothesis that a majority of dollars come from contributors who prefer to support likely winners third the total contributions made to a candidate are a positive function of the district s median years of schooling completed and the gini coefficient total contributions made to a democratic candidate are also a positive function of the median income finally had house campaigns been financed in the early 1970s even to the point of giving each major party candidate 150 000 in 1978 dollars few elections would have been changed it is also worth mentioning some of the things about the financing of political campaigns that we still do not know the above conclusions involve only elections to the u s house there are good reasons for suspecting that money is more influential in u s senate elections ols statistics support this belief and the greater visibility of those races help justify it although money has little effect on house elections we do not know whether contributions affect legislative voting in the house representatives apparently believe that expenditure influences their reelection chances given the complexity of the process it should be no surprise that this belief conflicts with our findings acting on this belief a representative s vote may very well be influenced by the sources of his contributions either directly or indirectly through the giving of access to contributors finally we should be reminded that the above model is static while the electoral process is dynamic the amount contributed to a candidate is affected by his probability of winning in the previous time period e g week month and in turn affects that probability in the following time period as usual what we know is overshadowed by what we do not know the above questions are both interesting in their own right and of interest to policy making

campaign spending limits incumbent spending and election outcomes abstract 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 electoral outcomes finding that larger limits lead to less close elections fewer candidates and lower voter turnout

the campaign value of incumbency a new solution to the puzzle of less effective incumbent spending 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 variable office benefits are unobserved then the effect is to make observed incumbent spending less effective than spending by challengers using data from the 2002 irish general election where incumbency was assigned a variable campaign value and included in declared campaign spending we are able to demonstrate this hidden incumbency effect and estimate its relationship to electoral success in terms of overall votes share of votes and probability of winning a seat contrary to previous research showing ineffective incumbent spending we find that when the campaign value of office is also measured public office value spending is not only very effective in winning votes but also seems to be more effective than regular incumbent spending

using repeat challengers to estimate the effect of campaign spending on election outcomes in the u s house previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending those studies however do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote getting ability across candidates high quality challengers are likely to receive a high fraction of the vote and have high campaign expenditures even if campaign spending has no impact on election outcomes to avoid that bias this paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes regardless of who does the spending campaign spending limits appear socially desirable but public financing of campaigns does not

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

campaign spending in proportional electoral systems incumbents versus challengers revisited this article a argues that campaign spending is no more effective for challengers than incumbents in congressional elections using candidate centered forms of proportional representation pr b develops a new method to estimate spending effects in poly candidate elections and c demonstrates that spending benefits incumbents as much as challengers in the congressional elections of three separate countries brazil ireland and finland this article also offers a theory of campaign spending effectiveness that emphasizes a candidate s relative potential to attract new electoral support as determined by both precampaign familiarity and personal partisan and ideological attributes challengers and incumbents obtain similar returns to spending under pr because its permissiveness encourages challengers who are limited in their abilities to build electoral support even when they spend heavily the theory and findings have important implications for understanding the effects of campaign finance and cam

are campaign contributions a form of speech evidence from recent us house elections this paper investigates the effects of the sources ofcandidates campaign funding on their electoral outcomes withparticular emphasis on whether candidates who rely on a narrowbase of funding suffer adverse electoral consequences anextensive dataset consisting of over 650 000 contributions tohouse candidates in elections from 1980 to 1992 is used theresults reveal a negative relationship between theconcentration of contributions and voteshare for open seatcandidates and challengers this finding appears to havesignificant implications for some of the empirical premisesunderlying the u s supreme court s landmark buckley v valeo decision at the very least it represents an importantstylized fact about us elections that is robust over 1980 1992 period

who monitors the monitor effect of party observers on electoral outcomes abstract we investigate whether electoral monitors who are in charge of assuring the fairness of elections interfere with their outcome more precisely does the monitors presence bias the results in favor of their own preferences to do so we construct a novel dataset from the raw voting records of the 2011 national elections in argentina we exploit a natural experiment to show that electoral observers cause on average a 1 5 increase in the vote count for the observers preferred party which can reach up to 6 for some parties this bias which appears under various electoral rules occurs mainly in municipalities with lower civic capital and weakens the accountability role of elections

specification of policy rules and performance measures in multicountry simulation studies abstract much recent analysis of international monetary and fiscal policy issues has been conducted by stochastic simulations with multicountry econometric models in these studies it has become standard practice to consider alternative policy rules of a form that calls for departures of a policy instrument from some baseline reference path that are proportional to deviations of a specified target variable from its own baseline path the present paper argues that this standard rule form is seriously defective for such issues because th eimplied rules often fail to be operational and have associated performance measures that can be misleading in important cases jel c50 f30

electoral competition and special interest politics have fixed positions on some issues but vary their positions on others in order to attract votes and campaign contributions in this context we examine whether special interest groups are governed by an electoral motive or an influence in their campaign giving and how their contributions affect the equilibrium platforms we show that each party is induced to behave as if it were maximizing a weighted sum of the aggregate welfares of informed voters and members of special interest groups the party that is expected to win a majority of seats caters more to the special interests

exchange rate management and macroeconomic policy a national perspective this paper reviews the literature on alternative exchange rate arrangements for a small economy it discusses exchange rate management for short run stabilization purposes and the choice of exchange rate regimes to foster policy discipline recent research has emphasized that the appropriate degree of exchange rate flexibility depends on the nature of disturbances exchange rate movements provide information about shocks and can serve as a basis for intervention rules empirically operational guidelines have not yet been provided floating rates are said to be desirable because they allow policy makers greater autonomy recent research has questioned the implicit assumption that autonomy is always useful rules that prevent discretionary policy may be preferable what role if any the exchange rate should play in such rules has not yet been resolved

strategic politicians and unresponsive voters t0 resolve the paradoxical finding that economic conditions and presidential popularity powerfully relate to quadrennial movement in the house vote but explain little individual voting variation jacobson and kernell have advanced their strategic politicians model of midterm elections purportedly the early year political environment helps determine how many of a party s strong potential contenders risk challenging incumbents voters in turn respond to the quality of candidates before them in november and thus indirectly reward the party favored by this early year environment despite its current prominence however the theory does not stand up to empirical investigation a time series equation of midterm outcomes regressed on early year national conditions does not fare particularly well when contrasted with comparable equations assuming direct effects voting furthermore challenger quality has only a weak influence on individual voters subordinate in fact to the effects of economic attitudes and presidential evaluations

the impact of campaign spending on votes in multiparty elections abstract the impact of candidate campaign spending on votes and abstention in multiparty elections is estimated from the specification of a structural model of voter behavior this model accounts for the endogeneity of campaign spending as well as the heterogeneity in voter preferences empirical results are estimated from aggregate actual election data the results demonstrate the importance of spending during the campaign period and voter heterogeneity with respect to these expenditures the own and cross expenditure vote share elasticity estimates reveal that political campaign spending not only redistributes voters across parties but also decreases the size of the abstaining group of the electorate

the effects of campaign spending in house elections new evidence for old arguments the question of how campaign spending affects election results remains open because the simultaneity problem has proven so intractable green and krasno s 1988 recent attempt to solve the problem and to demonstrate that marginal returns on spending are as great for incumbents as for challengers again comes up short a panel feature of the abc newslwashington post congressional district poll conducted during the 1986 elections offers a fresh perspective on the question analysis of changes in voting intentions during the final six weeks of the campaign shows that as the tainted ols studies have invariably suggested the amount spent by the challenger is far more important in accounting for voter s decisions than is the amount spent by the incumbent

explaining deindustrialization how affluence productivity growth and globalization diminish manufacturing employment1 this study analyzes why the world s most economically advanced countries have deindustrialized over the last few decades previous research focuses on three causal factors 1 rising consumer affluence and its propensity to increase demand for services more than for manufactured goods 2 faster productivity growth in the manufacturing sector relative to other sectors and 3 expanding trade linkages between the north and the south of the global economy the relative importance of these factors however is not fully understood because previous research has not tested all of these explanations simultaneously nor considered the indirect channels through which global trade may cause deindustrialization this study tests the three factors with two way fixed effects regression models and panel data on 18 oecd countries from 1970 to 2003 the results indicate that each factor makes significant contributions to deindustrialization and that global trade exerts both direct and indirect effects on employment

district complexity as an advantage in congressional elections scholars of congressional elections have argued that an increase in constituent diversity increases the level of electoral competition following models of boundedly rational candidates we argue that there is strong reason to believe that the opposite is true as the complexity of the electoral landscape increases challengers will have a more difficult time locating an optimal platform when facing an experienced incumbent using data from the 2000 national annenberg election study we construct a novel measure of district complexity for u s house districts and test whether the entry of quality challengers and the incumbent s share of the two party vote are affected by the complexity of the electoral landscape we find strong support for the hypothesis that complexity benefits incumbents for both indicators of electoral competition which stands in contrast to most of the existing literature on diversity and incumbent performance

policy responsiveness and incumbent reelection in state legislatures does policy responsiveness on the part of incumbent legislators affect their prospects for reelection recent studies of congressional campaigns demonstrate that incumbents who support policies that are more congruent with their constituents preferences face fewer reelection obstacles the present analysis considers this question in state legislative elections where voter knowledge of legislator activities is generally quite low the findings demonstrate that incumbents positioned farther from the average citizen and toward their party s base are only slightly more likely to be challenged than other incumbents however more partisan voting incumbents do attract challengers capable of raising and spending larger amounts of money interestingly incumbents positioned closer to their party s base actually receive a greater share of the vote in most contested elections only when challengers spend significant amounts of money do we see the positive effects of partisan voting by incumbents diminished overall these findings demonstrate the mechanisms by which policy positions of incumbents in a low information environment affect the challengers that emerge and the level of voter support received

campaign advertising and voter welfare this paper investigates the role of campaign advertising and the opportunity of legal restrictions on it an electoral race is modeled as a signalling game with three classes of players many voters two candidates and one interest group the group has non verifiable insider information on the candidates quality and on the basis of this information offers a contribution to each candidate in exchange for a favorable policy position candidates spend the contributions they receive on non directly informative advertising this paper shows that 1 a separating equilibrium exists in which the group contributes to a candidate only if the insider information about that candidate is positive 2 although voters are fully rational a ban on campaign advertising can be welfare improving and 3 split contributions may arise in equilibrium and if they arise too often they are detrimental to voters

campaign advertising and election outcomes quasi natural experiment evidence from gubernatorial elections in brazil whether campaign advertising influences election outcomes is an open question a paradox given the amount spent on campaigning in general and tv advertising in particular we argue that such absence of documentation is due to the focus of the empirical literature on the u s where the allocation of campaign spending and advertising is decentralized we explore a quasi natural experiment that enables us to mitigate the omitted variables and reverse causality problems caused by decentralized allocation in brazil gubernatorial elections work in a two round system in the first round candidates tv time shares are determined by their coalitions share of seats in the national parliament in the second round tv time is split equally between the first round winner and runner up using differences between rounds as a source of variation we find a large causal effect of tv advertising on election outcomes

the international transmission of economic shocks in a three country world under mixed exchange rates the international transmission of economic disturbances is analysed in a three country world where two countries have no macroeconomic impact on a third country but are large enough to influence each other under a system of mixed exchange rates a system that combines the fixed exchange rates fers among two ec member countries germany and france and the flexible exchange rates flers towards a third country the rest of the world usa we find that a positive output demand shock originating in germany or france has a positive effect on domestic output but due to a special third country effect is likely to produce a contractionary impact on foreign output negative transmission while the total effect on the world economy is expansionary money supply shocks in either germany or france have identical effects on the output of the two countries the fler component of the mer regime serves as an important tool for dampening the impact of us shocks on the output of the ec

strategic campaigns and redistributive politics the article investigates strategic informative campaigning by two parties when politics concern redistribution voters are uncertain about whether parties favour special groups parties will target campaigns on groups where most votes are gained by informing about policies in equilibrium campaigning will be most intensive in groups where the uncertainty is largest and where voters are most mobile most likely to vote most receptive to campaigns and relatively uninformed initially these groups will become more informed about policy parties will therefore gain more votes by treating these groups well so these groups will gain from strategic campaigning welfare effects are assessed

campaign spending with office seeking politicians rational voters and multiple lobbies abstract i introduce a microfounded model of campaign finance with office seeking politicians a continuum of voters and a large number of heterogeneous lobbies lobbies make contributions to politicians according to a common agency framework politicians use contributions to finance their electoral expenditures voters are not fooled by electoral expenditures they are influenced in a way that is consistent with the equilibrium behavior of lobbies and politicians the model is used to i determine the relation between campaign spending and the deviation from the median voter s preferred policy ii show the informational value of lobbies contributions iii evaluate the welfare implications of restricting campaign spending and iv interpret the empirical finding that campaign expenditures have a very low effect on election outcome although in equilibrium advertising provides voters with useful information under reasonable parameter values a ban on campaign contributions makes the median voter better off journal of economic literature classification numbers d72 d82 m37

field experiments testing the impact of radio advertisements on electoral competition results from previous studies of campaign spending imply that equal sized grants to both incumbents and challengers are a net benefit to challengers who on average spend less money and derive greater marginal returns from each additional dollar this study provides an experimental test of this proposition cities holding mayoral elections in november 2005 and 2006 were randomly assigned to broadcast nonpartisan radio ads that stated the names of the mayoral candidates reminded listeners about the date of the upcoming election and encouraged them to vote consistent with the findings of previous studies on the differential effects of incumbent and challenger campaign spending on election outcomes we find that these radio ads produced substantially more competitive elections the borderline statistical significance of our results however invites replication of this experiment

electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters i present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies informed voters however vote based on those policies so candidates face a trade off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies particularistic and collective in the case of particularistic policies the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion the model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages for the case of collective policies the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters and contributions are zero

clientelism and vote buying lessons from field experiments in african elections electoral clientelism and vote buying are widely perceived as major obstacles to economic development this is because they may limit the provision of public goods in this paper we review the literature on clientelism and vote buying and propose the use of field experiments to evaluate empirically the consequences of these phenomena we provide an overview discuss implementation and interpret the main results of recent field experiments conducted by the authors in west african countries clientelism and vote buying seem to be effective and to enjoy widespread electoral support the results suggest that increased access to information and political participation by women may limit clientelism in addition voter education campaigns may undermine the effects of vote buying on voting behaviour we argue that our findings may inform the design of development aid interventions as a way effectively to increase public good political accountability we also discuss directions for fruitful future research copyright 2009 oxford university press