Question

Four key elements must be coordinated in order for any campaign to be successful: the Message, the Machine, the Media, and Money.

In Texas, these elements must be reconciled with the prevailing political culture of Traditionalism and Individualism. Has the rise of Interactive Social Media affected the way in which campaigns are conducted in Texas? Has campaigning become easier? More difficult? More expensive? Less expensive? Please explain your answer.

Answer 1

Solution:

Our understanding of the effects of campaign spending in elections to the U.S. House of Representatives remains at a curious impasse. In one sense research findings are clear & remarkably consistent over the eight elections since 1972, when usable spending data first became available: campaign expenditures appear to have sharply different electoral consequences for officeholders & their opponents. In campaigns against incumbents, the more challengers spend, the more votes they receive, and the more likely they are to win. The more incumbents spend, on the other hand, the lower their vote, and the greater their chances of losing. No one has taken this to mean that incumbents routinely lose votes and elections by spending money. They merely spend more money the more strongly they are challenged, and the stronger the challenge, the worse the incumbent does. Taking the challenger's level of campaign spending into account, the incumbent's level of spending shows a quite small but positive relationship to the incumbent's number of votes and probability of winning, although the coefficients achieve statistical significance only when data from several years are combined to produce a very large number of cases (Jacobson 1989). The challenger's level of spending, by contrast, remain strongly and significantly related to both the vote and to the probability of victory without combining election years no matter what controls are introduced and no matter what functional forms are analyzed (Glantz, Abramowitz, and Burkhart 1976; Jacobson 1976, 1978, 1980, 1985, 1987a). A straightforward explanation of these findings is that incumbents, exploiting the extensive communication resources available to every member of Congress, saturate their districts with information about themselves, their virtues and services, before the formal campaign begins. Further campaigning thus pro- *I am obliged to Stephen Ansolabehere, Nathaniel Beck, and Mathew McCubbins for their helpful advice and instruction. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 34, No. 2, May 1990, Pp. 334-62 C 1990 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713 CAMPAIGN SPENDING: NEW EVIDENCE 335 duces, at best, very modest additional gains in support. Challengers, in contrast, typically begin the campaign in obscurity. Because voters are demonstrably reluctanto vote for candidates they know nothing about, challengers have a great deal to gain by making themselves better (and, of course, more favorably) known to the electorate. Their level of campaign activity-largely, if not entirely, a function of campaign spending-thus has a strong influence on how well they do at the polls (Jacobson 1978, 1987b). Despite their temporal stability, these findings remain open to serious question, for it has been obvious from the beginning of this line of research that the relationship between money and votes must be reciprocal. This is because the amount of money raised by candidates depends, in part, on how well they are expected to do on election day. Campaign spending may affecthe vote, but the (expected) vote affects campaign contributions, and thus spending, because potential donors give more to candidates in races that are expected to be close. They are especially sensitive to the prospects of challengers; the better achallenger's apparent chances, the more money he or she receives from all sources. Contributions to incumbents increase with their anticipated vulnerability, mainly because threatened incumbents engage in more vigorous fund-raising (Jacobson 1980). This being so, ordinary least squares (OLS) models must produce biased and inconsistent estimates of the true parameters because endogenous variables (those which have a reciprocal effect on one another), treated as explanatory variables, are correlated with the error term (Johnston 1972, 343). In particular, OLS models may underestimate the effect of spending by incumbents and overestimate the effect of spending by challengers. Accurate measurement of these effects is more than an academic exercise. To the degree that the marginal returns on campaign spending are greater for challengers than for incumbents, proposed limits on raising and spending money would reduce electoral competition below already abysmal levels (Jacobson 1978, 1979, 1987a). To the degree that returns on spending approach equality (or even favor incumbents), then laws that reduce the incumbent's usual spending advantage would enhance competition. Thus Donald Green and Jonathan Krasno's recent (1988) article arguing that spending benefits incumbents at least as much as their opponents stands as an important challenge to both prior analyses and to the policy conclusions derived from them. My purpose in this article is to point out some of the weaknesses in their analysis and to examine some new evidence that strongly reinforces the conventional findings.