Campaign Advertising and Election Outcomes: Quasi-Natural Experiment Evidence from Gubernatorial Elections in Brazil

Bernardo S. da Silveira and Joao De Mello
Additional contact information
Bernardo S. da Silveira: Department of Economic, New York University

No 550, Textos para discussão from Department of Economics PUC-Rio (Brazil)

Abstract: 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 United States, in which the allocation of campaign spending and advertising is decentralized. We explore a quasinatural 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.

Keywords: TV Advertising; Campaign Spending; Election Outcomes; Endogeneity; Quasi-Natural Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26p
Date: 2007-08, Revised 2010-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mac, nep-mkt and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.puc-rio.br/uploads/adm/trabalhos/files/td550.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Campaign Advertising and Election Outcomes: Quasi-natural Experiment Evidence from Gubernatorial Elections in Brazil (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rio:texdis:550

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Textos para discussão from Department of Economics PUC-Rio (Brazil) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().