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How Do Campaign Spending Limits Affect Elections? Evidence from the United Kingdom 1885–2019

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

ALEXANDER FOUIRNAIES Open the ORCID record for ALEXANDER FOUIRNAIES [Opens in a new window]
ALEXANDER FOUIRNAIES*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
*
Alexander Fouirnaies, Assistant Professor, Harris School, University of Chicago, [email protected].
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Abstract

In more than half of the democratic countries in the world, candidates face legal constraints on how much money they can spend on their electoral campaigns, yet we know little about the consequences of these restrictions. I study how spending limits affect UK House of Commons elections. I contribute new data on the more than 70,000 candidates who ran for a parliamentary seat from 1885 to 2019, and I document how much money each candidate spent, how they allocated their resources across different spending categories, and the spending limit they faced. To identify the effect on elections, I exploit variation in spending caps induced by reforms of the spending-limit formula that affected some but not all constituencies. The results indicate that when the level of permitted spending is increased, the cost of electoral campaigns increases, which is primarily driven by expenses related to advertisement and mainly to the disadvantage of Labour candidates; the pool of candidates shrinks and elections become less competitive; and the financial and electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbents are amplified.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 115 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 395 - 411
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank Scott Ashworth, Chris Berry, Peter Buisseret, David Butler, Julia Cagé, Gary Cox, Torun Dewan, Edgard Dewitte, Wiola Dziuda, Andy Eggers, Anthony Fowler, Ron Johnston, Jens Hainmueller, Andy Hall, Dominik Hangartner, Jim Fearon, Steve Levitt, Roger Myerson, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, Jim Snyder, Arthur Spirling, and Stephane Wolton. I thank the participants at Stanford University’s Comparative Politics Workshop, Nuffield College’s Politics Workshop, and the University of Copenhagen’s Economics Department Workshop. I’m indebted to Andy Eggers and Arthur Spirling for generously sharing their data on the electoral outcomes of general elections. For excellent research assistance, I thank George Beknazar, Rachel Dec, Elysa Geras, Alec MacMillen, and Saurabh Sharma. All remaining errors are my own. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AP0DHP.

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