Collaborative Research on Spending and Incumbency in Congressional Elections: A Game-Theoretic Approach

国会选举中支出和任职的合作研究：博弈论方法

• 批准号: 9224787
• 负责人: Thomas Palfrey
• 金额: $ 10.62万
• 依托单位: California Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1993
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1993-02-15 至 1997-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9224787&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Spending; Incumbency; Congressional

This project investigates the relationships between campaign spending, incumbency and electoral outcomes in U.S. Congressional elections. The approach combines formal political/economic methodologies, statistical modelling, and analysis of empirical data during the period 1970-1990. The theoretical models are aimed at understanding the strategic factors underlying spending races between challengers and incumbents. The game-theoretic approach employed emphasizes the importance of looking at both causal directions in the vote-spending connection. In one direction, campaign finance/spending activities affect margins of victory and can be a deciding factor in who wins an election; in the other direction, candidate and contributor expectations of how close the election is likely to be affect campaign finance/spending decisions. Both directons are important, and the jointness or simultaneity of spending decisions and voting outcomes leads to difficult statistical problems of measurement and estimation, as well as raising a number of challenging theoretical issues. Most previous research focuses primarily on one direction (the first one mentioned above), and attempts to fit a "vote equation" to measure the effect of spending on electoral outcomes. The current approach explicitly combines this with an estimation of "spending equations," where the reciprocal effect of anticipated closeness is simultaneously estimated with the effect of spending on the final outcome. This enables the investigators to disentangle some complex interactions between the variables of primary interest: incumbent spending, challenger spending, and the vote share of the incumbent. Preliminary results of this investigation suggest substantial revisions to the central findings of several prior studies, and point to interesting new directions for investigation within the framework of this game-theoretic approach. Those new directions, both theoretical and empirical, form the agenda of this research project.

这个项目调查了运动之间的关系 美国国会的开支、任职和选举结果 选举 该方法结合了正式的政治/经济 方法、统计建模和实证分析 1970-1990年期间的数据。 理论模型旨在 理解消费竞赛背后的战略因素 挑战者和现任者之间的关系。 博弈论方法 就业强调的重要性，看看因果关系， 投票支出方面的方向。 在一个方向上， 竞选资金/支出活动影响胜利的幅度， 可能是谁赢得选举的决定性因素;在另一个 方向，候选人和贡献者的期望如何接近 选举可能会影响竞选资金/开支 决策 这两种直接关系都很重要， 支出决定和投票结果的不确定性导致 测量和估计的困难统计问题，如 并提出了一些具有挑战性的理论问题。 大多数以前的研究主要集中在一个方向（ 上面提到的第一个），并试图拟合一个“投票方程” 来衡量支出对选举结果的影响。 的 目前的方法明确地将这一点与估计相结合， “支出方程”，其中预期的相互影响 密切度是同时估计与支出的影响 对最终结果的看法 这使调查人员能够 解开变量之间的一些复杂的相互作用， 主要利益：现任支出，挑战者支出， 现任者的投票份额。 调查的初步结果表明 对先前几项研究的中心发现进行了修订， 指出了有趣的新方向的调查内， 这个博弈论方法的框架。 新航向乐团， 理论和实证，形成本研究的议程 项目