IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v73y1992i3p319-33.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Presidential Campaign Expenditures: Evidence on Allocations and Effects

Author

Listed:
  • Nagler, Jonathan
  • Leighley, Jan

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of presidential campaign spending on election results. Analyses of expenditures and voting are often plagued by simultaneity between campaign spending and expected vote share. However, game-theoretic models of resource-allocation decisions made by a central actor (i.e., a presidential campaign) suggest that candidates will spend more in close races and in races likely to be pivotal. The authors provide empirical support for this theory; using Federal Communications Commission data from the 1972 presidential election, they find that expenditures were higher in states where the election was expected to be closer and in states likely to be pivotal. They use these two factors as instruments in a two-stage least squares model to estimate the effect of spending on votes. They find that, contrary to previous theory and research, presidential campaign spending significantly increases a candidates's vote share. Copyright 1992 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Suggested Citation

  • Nagler, Jonathan & Leighley, Jan, 1992. "Presidential Campaign Expenditures: Evidence on Allocations and Effects," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 73(3), pages 319-333, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:73:y:1992:i:3:p:319-33
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Strömberg, David, 2002. "Optimal Campaigning in Presidential Elections: The Probability of Being Florida," Seminar Papers 706, Stockholm University, Institute for International Economic Studies.
    2. Kevin Milligan & Marie Rekkas, 2008. "Campaign spending limits, incumbent spending, and election outcomes," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 41(4), pages 1351-1374, November.
    3. Epstein, Gil S. & Heizler, Odelia, 2018. "Minority Groups and Success in Election Primaries," GLO Discussion Paper Series 187, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    4. Rhode, Paul W. & Snyder, Jr., James M. & Strumpf, Koleman, 2018. "The arsenal of democracy: Production and politics during WWII," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 145-161.
    5. Sebasti'an Morales & Charles Thraves, 2020. "On the Resource Allocation for Political Campaigns," Papers 2012.02856, arXiv.org.
    6. Nicholas Bloom & Carol Propper & Stephan Seiler & John Van Reenen, 2015. "The Impact of Competition on Management Quality: Evidence from Public Hospitals," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 82(2), pages 457-489.
    7. Sharma, Priyanka & Wagman, Liad, 2020. "Advertising and Voter Data in Asymmetric Political Contests," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(C).
    8. Larcinese, Valentino & Snyder, James M. & Testa, Cecilia, 2013. "Testing Models of Distributive Politics using Exit Polls to Measure Voters’ Preferences and Partisanship," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 43(4), pages 845-875, October.
    9. Gebhard Kirchgässner & Tobias Schulz, 2005. "Expected Closeness or Mobilisation: Why Do Voters Go to the Polls? Empirical Results for Switzerland, 1981 – 1999," CESifo Working Paper Series 1387, CESifo.
    10. Sinha, Pankaj & Kumar, Amit & Biswas, Sumana & Gupta, Chirag, 2024. "Forecasting US Presidential Election 2024 using multiple machine learning algorithms," MPRA Paper 122490, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 22 Oct 2024.
    11. Epstein, Gil S., 2000. "Personal productivity and the likelihood of electoral success of political candidates," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 95-111, March.
    12. Sebastián Morales & Charles Thraves, 2021. "On the Resource Allocation for Political Campaigns," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 30(11), pages 4140-4159, November.
    13. Gil Epstein & Raphaël Franck, 2007. "Campaign resources and electoral success: Evidence from the 2002 French parliamentary elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 131(3), pages 469-489, June.
    14. Manfred Dix & Rudy Santore, 2003. "Campaign Contributions with Swing Voters," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(3), pages 285-301, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:73:y:1992:i:3:p:319-33. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.