The Determinants and the Effects of Campaign Communication in Competitive Elections

This dissertation studies the provision and the effects of information in competitive elections. In the first chapter, titled "How do Campaigns Shape Vote Choice?", we provide multi-country evidence that a substantial fraction of voters decide whom to vote for over the last two months leading to an election, and we document through which mechanisms vote choices are formed during the campaign season. In the second chapter, "The Minimal Impact of TV Debates", we use an event-study approach to estimate the specific contribution of televised debates between candidates to the process of vote choice formation. In the third chapter, "Strategic Campaign Communication Under Party Constraints", I exploit a novel dataset of 30,000 candidate manifestos to study how individual politicians run strategic campaigns when their policy positions are tied to a national party platform./nIn "How do Campaigns Shape Vote Choice?", written with Vincent Pons, we use multi-country data from 62 elections since 1952 to show that 17% to 29% of voters make up their mind during the final two months of campaigns, generating sizeable swings in candidates’ vote shares. To estimate this fraction, we assembled a dataset of nationally representative surveys conducted around 62 elections from 1952 to 2017 in ten OECD countries, for a total of 253,000 observations. All of the surveys entailed interviewing a new set of people every day running up to the election to elicit their vote intention, then surveying these same people again after the election to record their actual vote choice. By comparing voters' responses in the two waves, we can ascertain whether they had already settled on their final choice by the time of the pre-electoral survey without having to rely on their own recollection of the date when they made up their mind. To shed light on the mechanisms through which information affects people's vote choice, we use a set of questions about the respondents' policy preferences, issues they find most important, and their beliefs on the candidates' positions and attributes -- which, similarly to questions on vote choice, were asked in both the pre- and post-electoral surveys. We find that changes in vote choice are concomitant to shifts in salient issues and beliefs about candidates, while policy preferences remain remarkably stable./nIn "The Minimal Impact of TV Debates" -- also written with Vincent Pons -- we investigate the role of discrete events in the formation of vote choice, and focus on TV debates between candidates for president or prime minister. We use an event-study approach pooling 56 TV debates in 31 elections and seven countries of our sample of surveys. We do not find any significant impact of TV debates on individual consistency between vote intention and vote choice. At the aggregate level, debates do not significantly affect the distance between predicted and final vote shares, and only slightly increase short-term daily changes in parties' predicted vote shares. Using our estimates of the overall vote choice formation over the final two months of campaigns as a benchmark, we find that, on average, a TV debate contributes no more than 3% of the total increase in vote choice consistency and 2% of the total convergence to final vote shares. In sum, the contribution of TV debates to the formation of vote decisions is negligible, suggesting that information continuously received by voters during electoral campaigns exerts more influence on their behavior./nIn "Strategic Campaign Communication under Party Constraints", I assemble a novel dataset of more than 30,000 candidate manifestos issued over 35 years to study how politicians strategically use their campaign communication at the individual level. Existing models predict that, under electoral pressure, candidates should compete on policy issues and converge to the policy position that is preferred by their electorate. However, in many contexts, individual politicians belong to a party and cannot deviate from the policy platform determined at the party level. How do candidates run strategic campaigns when their ability to adjust their policy position is limited? To address this question, I exploit a unique institutional setting—the French legislative elections—in which individual candidates compete in two-round elections and issue their own campaign manifesto before each election round. This systematic record of campaign messages issued at different stages of the competition allows to measure adjustments in campaign communication as the set of competitors is reduced. Using computational text analysis, I show that candidates who benefit from the support of fewer base voters in their district are more likely to appeal to other voters in the runoff, by moderating their discourse and emphasizing consensus-based non-policy issues (e.g. individual traits or local issues) as opposed to partisan policy positions. In addition, I find that discourse moderation predicts better performance once in office. While we tend to pay more attention to party-level competition, my results indicate that candidate-specific campaigns can give voters information that matters for representation and is hidden from national party platforms—such as information on individual politician quality.

Advisor: Finan, Frederico