This paper studies the impact of campaign spending on votes in French legislative elections. We exploit the political financing reforms which were adopted in France in the mid-1990s. Under the new laws, spending limits were reduced, legal persons were no longer allowed to finance candidates, and...

We explore how public opinion polls affect candidates' campaign spending in political competition. Generally, polls lead to (more) asymmetric behavior. Under a majority rule there always exists an equilibrium in which the initially more popular candidate invests more in the campaign and thereby...

This paper uses a new database on campaign funding on French members of parliament to analyze their efficiency. The database includes the level of funding, as well as the origin of the resources the politicians have at their disposal. The funding sources are identified with true resources used...

Information affecting a candidate's reputation might have significant electoral consequences. Do candidates respond to the release of information? Using Brazilian elections and audits as an exogenous source of information, I show that both incumbent and challenger increase their campaign...

Pork-barrel spending is the use of federal money for localized projects that yield only a narrow geographic benefit. It is a commonly held belief that politicians use this spending to improve their chances of re-election. One way that an incumbent can increase their chances of re-election is...

What are the political consequences of the diffusion of broadband internet? We address this question by studying the 2008 US presidential election, the first political campaign where the internet played a key role. Drawing on data from the FEC and the FCC, we provide robust evidence that...

Elections constitute the essential element of democracy, yet surprisingly little is known about their immediate consequences for individual well-being. Cross-country empirical evidence is particularly absent for the campaign period leading up to elections. While elections as a process allow...

We study a model of elections in non-majoritarian systems that captures the link between competition in policies and competition in campaign spending. We argue that the overall competitiveness of the political arena depends both on the endogenous number of parties contesting the election and the...

We study the connection between religion and political radicalization in Weimar Germany, where the Catholic Church vehemently warned ordinary parishioners about the dangers of National Socialism. Methodologically, we show that instrumental variables techniques are useful not only for making...

We estimate the effects of one of the largest anti-vote-buying campaigns ever studied — with half a million voters exposed across 1427 villages — in Uganda’s 2016 elections. Working with civil society organizations, we designed the study to estimate how voters and candidates responded to...