Campaign War Chests in Congressional Elections

Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder

Business and Politics, 2000, vol. 2, issue 1, 9-33

Abstract: This paper examines several hypotheses that have been proposed to explain the existence and growth of legislators' campaign “warchests”. We examine the sources and political consequences of warchests in US House elections over the period of 1978–1998. Briefly, our findings are as follows. First, we find little evidence in support of the deterrence hypotheses. Second, short-term electoral forces-scandals, partisan tides, challenger quality-accounts for a large fraction of the explained variation in savings. Third, incumbents act as if they have finite, “target” levels of total savings. Fourth, some of the accumulated savings before 1992 appear to be for retirement. Finally, we find considerable evidence that many of the largest warchests are accumulated to help members run for higher office.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
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:cup:buspol:v:2:y:2000:i:01:p:9-33_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Business and Politics from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().