The heterogeneous price of a vote: Evidence from multiparty systems, 1993–2017

Yasmine Bekkouche, Julia Cagé and Edgard Dewitte

Journal of Public Economics, 2022, vol. 206, issue C

Abstract: What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993–2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates’ vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates’ party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter.

Keywords: Elections; Campaign financing; Campaign expenditures; Campaign finance reform; Multiparty electoral data; Heterogeneous effects of campaign spending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272100195X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The Heterogeneous Price of a Vote: Evidence from Multiparty Systems, 1993-2017 (2022)
Working Paper: The Heterogeneous Price of a Vote: Evidence from Multiparty Systems, 1993-2017 (2022)
Working Paper: The Heterogeneous Price of a Vote: Evidence from Multiparty Systems, 1993-2017 (2022)
Working Paper: The Heterogeneous Price of a Vote: Evidence from Multiparty Systems, 1993-2017 (2022)
Working Paper: The Heterogeneous Price of a Vote: Evidence from Multiparty Systems, 1993-2017 (2020)
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:eee:pubeco:v:206:y:2022:i:c:s004727272100195x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2021.104559

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().