It Takes Money to Make MPs: Evidence from 160 Years of British Campaign Spending

Julia Cagé and Edgard Dewitte

The Journal of Economic History, 2025, vol. 85, issue 4, 962-1000

Abstract: We study electoral campaigns over the long run, through the lens of their spending. We build a novel, exhaustive dataset on U.K. general elections from 1857 to 2017. We provide quantitative insights on the history of campaigns, including the shift away from paid staff toward advertising. We then show that the correlation between candidate spending and votes has strongly increased since the 1880s, peaking in the last quarter of the twentieth century. We link this pattern to the introduction of new information technologies—in particular, local radio and the Internet—and to the transformations of campaign strategies.

Date: 2025
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