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

这个项目调查了美国国会选举中竞选支出、在任和选举结果之间的关系。该方法结合了正式的政治/经济方法、统计模型和对1970-1990年期间经验数据的分析。这些理论模型旨在理解挑战者和现任者之间支出竞赛背后的战略因素。所采用的博弈论方法强调了在选票支出关系中同时考察两个因果方向的重要性。一方面，竞选资金/支出活动影响获胜幅度，并可能成为谁赢得选举的决定性因素；另一方面，候选人和捐赠者对选举可能势均力敌的预期影响竞选资金/支出决定。这两个方向都很重要，支出决定和投票结果的联合或同时导致了难以衡量和估计的统计问题，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(上文提到的第一个方向)，并试图用“投票方程式”来衡量支出对选举结果的影响。目前的方法明确地将这一点与“支出方程式”的估计相结合，其中预期接近的互惠效应与支出对最终结果的影响同时被估计。这使得调查人员能够理清主要利益变量之间的一些复杂的相互作用：现任支出、挑战者支出和现任投票份额。这项调查的初步结果表明，对先前几项研究的中心发现进行了实质性的修订，并指出了在这一博弈论方法框架内进行研究的有趣的新方向。这些新的方向，无论是理论上的还是实证上的，都构成了本研究项目的议程。

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.