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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.