中文摘要
竞选支出对选票有何影响？这种影响是否因选举类型、政党或选举环境而异？估计这些效应需要涵盖候选人、政党和选举的全面支出数据，以及能够处理多党制体系中竞选支出的内生性与策略性的识别策略。本文在这两个方面均提供了新的贡献。我们构建了一个涵盖1993–2017年期间所有法国立法选举和英国大选的新综合数据集。我们提出了新的实证设定，包括一种新的工具变量，其依赖于这样一个事实：不同候选人在其主要依赖的资金来源受到监管时会受到差异化影响。我们发现，在英国和法国的选举中，每位选民支出的增加持续提高了候选人的得票份额，且该效应因候选人所属政党而具有异质性。具体而言，我们表明激进与极端政党的支出回报远低于主流政党，且这可部分由极端投票所附带的社交污名来解释。我们的发现有助于调和现有文献中相互冲突的结果，并增进我们对竞选为何重要的理解。
Abstract
What is the impact of campaign spending on votes? Does it vary across election types, political parties or electoral settings? Estimating these effects requires comprehensive data on spending across candidates, parties and elections, as well as identification strategies that handle the endogenous and strategic nature of campaign spending in multiparty systems. This paper provides novel contributions in both of these areas. We build a new comprehensive dataset of all French legislative and UK general elections over the 1993–2017 period. We propose new empirical specifications, including a new instrument that relies on the fact that candidates are differentially affected by regulation on the source of funding on which they depend the most. We find that an increase in spending per voter consistently improves candidates’ vote share, both at British and French elections, and that the effect is heterogeneous depending on candidates’ party. In particular, we show that spending by radical and extreme parties has much lower returns than spending by mainstream parties, and that this can be partly explained by the social stigma attached to extreme voting. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results of the existing literature, and improve our understanding of why campaigns matter.