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The Effects of Campaign Spending in Congressional Elections*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Gary C. Jacobson
Gary C. Jacobson*
Affiliation:
Trinity College
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Abstract

Incomplete understanding of the connection between campaign spending and election outcomes has hindered evaluation of enacted and proposed congressional campaign finance reforms. Reanalysis of the 1972 and 1974 House and Senate campaign spending data using both OLS and 2SLS regression models shows that spending by challengers has a much greater impact on the outcome than does spending by incumbents. A similar analysis of the effects of spending on voters' recall of candidates in the 1972 and 1974 SRC surveys supports the explanation that campaign expenditures buy nonincumbents the necessary voter recognition already enjoyed by incumbents prior to the campaign. The 1974 survey questions on Senate candidates indicate that, although the inability to remember candidates' names does not preclude having opinions about them, voters recalling candidates are much more likely to offer evaluative comments, and these more frequently refer to candidates personally. Aware voters offer more negative as well as positive evaluations (though positive outnumber negative); familiarity is not automatically advantageous. And voters' evaluations of candidates strongly influence how they vote. The implications of these findings for congressional campaign finance policy are readily apparent.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 469 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1978

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Christopher Achen, Forrest Nelson, John Ferejohn, Roger Noll, Stephen Rosenstone, William P. Welch, and Diane Zannoni for their helpful suggestions and critical comments on earlier versions of this article. They are of course free of any responsibility for its remaining shortcomings. The data used here were made available in part by the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research; I am solely responsible for all analyses and interpretations. Some of the material presented here was delivered under the title “Campaign Spending and Voter Awareness of Congressional Candidates,” at the Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 11–13, 1977 and in “The Electoral Consequences of Public Subsidies for Congressional Campaigns,” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 1–4, 1977.

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