The Effects of Election Advertising Spending and Incumbency on the General Election Results in Great Britain

This paper attempts to estimate the effect of campaign advertising expenditures on vote outcomes in Great Britain?s general election over 1992-2001. It uses an empirical method to estimate the impact of electoral campaign expenditures on votes, but also attempts to develop a signaling model in the election by estimating the relationship between campaign spending and quality signaling through incumbency status. Specifically, this paper examines an empirical analysis of the impact of campaign expenditures on votes cast in the general elections in Great Britain. It extends Lee (2010) to incorporate the incumbency and interactive effect. First, it includes candidate and party incumbency status into the benchmark model so as to estimate incumbency effects. Second, it includes an interaction term between candidate incumbency and candidate spending to estimate interactive effects. The main features of the estimation model are to assess the impact of campaign expenditures on votes by estimating incumbency and interactive effects on votes.