Abstract
Because campaign spending correlates strongly with election results, observers of American politics frequently lament that money seems to buy votes. However, the apparent effect of spending on votes is severely inflated by omitted variable bias: The best candidates also happen to be the best fundraisers. Acting strategically, campaign donors direct their funds toward the “best” candidates, who would be more likely to win even in a moneyless world. These donor behaviors spuriously amplify the correlation between spending and votes. As evidence for this argument, I show that (non-strategic) self-financed spending has no statistical effect on election results, whereas (strategic) externally-financed spending does.
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Notes
In calculating these percentages, I omit races where both candidates spent $50,000 (or $1 million). I also omit the handful of races where an independent or minor party candidate won.
Sheila Krumholz (Center for Responsive Politics) on “The World Today” (CNN), 5/26/2000.
Times editorial: June 28, 2008, p. A16. Post editorial, April 22, 2008, p. A18.
Editorial “Last Dash for Cash,” November 4, 2002, p. A14.
My analysis examines only major-party candidates. A few races have featured significant independent or minor party candidates; excluding such races does not change my findings.
I use this procedure only in the main analysis, where spending is used to predict votes. Similar results also obtain when spending is measured per capita, in the aggregate, or using other reasonable methods. These alternative specifications are available in an online appendix. In the portion of this paper where I show that self-finance is not strategic, I do not divide spending by logged population; instead, I simply control separately for logged population.
To obtain Squire’s scores for each candidate in the sample, a team of research assistants searched Lexis-Nexis news archives, various volumes of Who’s Who in American Politics, and official websites to compile candidate biographical information for all major-party candidates during this period. The resulting data were then coded using Squire’s method.
The online appendix is available on the author’s website: http://adambrown.info/p/research.
Available online at http://www.unc.edu/~beyle/jars.html.
Approval data are collected at different times in each state. I use the average of all polls in a state from the first 6 months of the election year. This time frame comes prior to the onset of major campaigning. It is therefore a measure of the incumbent’s strength going into the election rather than a measure of the challenger’s success in attacking the incumbent.
In her excellent and thorough book, Steen does not test whether the overall decision to self-finance is “strategic” in the sense that I use the term here. However, she does find evidence of other strategic behaviors. For example, she finds that candidates are strategic in deciding whether to spend their self-financed money early or late in the campaign. Moderate self-financers tend to frontload their spending, whereas extreme self-financers do not. There does not seem to be any theoretical reason that these sorts of patterns might interfere with my analysis. Just to be sure, the supplementary analysis in the online appendix shows that my conclusions do not change even when extreme self-financers are excluded from the analysis.
As evidence, consider the four most extreme self-financers in gubernatorial campaigns. Between 1998 and 2008, Tony Sanchez gave only $6,500 to other state-level candidates, a mere 0.01% of the $54.5 million he spent on his own campaign in 2002. The other three extreme self-financers have hardly been more generous. Doug Forrester, Dick DeVos, and Jon Corzine’s contributions to other candidates total 0.13, 0.80, and 2.12% (respectively) of their contributions to their own campaigns. (Data are contributions to state-level candidates between 1998 and 2008 as collected from followthemoney.org on February 4, 2010.)
These models exclude the three races featuring the four extreme self-financers (Corzine, Forrester, Devos, and Sanchez). Nevertheless, even with these potential outliers included, the results are similar. See Brown (2010).
For Democrats, the correlation is −0.09 (p = 0.26); for Republicans, it is −0.03 (p = 0.75). For incumbents of either party, the correlation is 0.09 (p = 0.40); for challengers, it is 0.14 (p = 0.21).
The line showing the effects of self-finance holds external finance at zero, and vice versa. Opponents are assumed to spend an average amount of externally-financed money but no self-financed money.
Perhaps it is easier to measure an incumbent’s “quality” than a newcomer’s. Within a group of first-time candidates, some will have political talent while others will not; the electoral process has not yet revealed which are which. Meanwhile, past elections have already revealed present incumbents as “quality” contenders. Essentially, incumbency indicates less empirical uncertainty about a candidate’s quality, whereas non-incumbency indicates greater empirical uncertainty. As a result, the omitted variable bias that plagued Models (1) and (3) would also plague political newcomers more than it plagues incumbents, causing us to overestimate the effect of spending by newcomers far more than we overestimate the effect of spending by incumbents.
By the same logic, some might think that voters would observe a wealthy challenger’s decision to self-finance as a similar signal about the incumbent’s vulnerability. Given that self-financers are typically far wealthier than average voters, however, voters may not see a candidate’s decision to spend a few million out of her multimillion accounts as a “costly” signal.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful comments, I thank Margaret Ferguson, Quin Monson, Kelly Patterson, Brandice Canes-Wrone, participants at the 2009 Conference on State Politics and Policy, participants at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, and participants in the Brigham Young University political science “Thursday Group.” Katrina Smith Cammack provided expert research assistance. Faults remain my own.
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Brown, A.R. Does Money Buy Votes? The Case of Self-Financed Gubernatorial Candidates, 1998–2008. Polit Behav 35, 21–41 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1