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Project

The effects of personal campaign spending in a semi open list PR system.

This project is about the effect of personal campaign expenses on the electoral result of individual candidates. Research about spending effects in majoritarian systems has shown that (1) spending has a significant effect, but (2) this effect is much stronger for challengers than for incumbents. Similar research about spending effects on the personal vote in proportional systems is inconclusive and this incumbency effect often fails to materialize. We argue that, in semi open PR systems, it makes more sense to analyse the effect of office on spending, instead of incumbency per se. We hypothesise that the size of the expense effect will diminish with the prominence of the office held by the candidate. A second main issue addressed by this research is that, while campaign expenses have been shown to affect the number of preference votes in a semi open PR system, they do not appear to affect the odds of actually being elected (due to the overwhelming impact of the position on the list). This raises the intriguing question why candidates bother to spend money in the first place. We hypothesise that spending does have an effect on the odds of obtaining a seat, but only in the long run : waging an expensive campaign and obtaining more preference votes will result in a higher position on the list at the next election. These hypotheses will be tested on the basis of a dataset about candidatures (with background characteristics and electoral expenses) in eight consecutive federal and regional elections (1991-2010) in the Flemish region of Belgium. As part of the project the dataset will be expanded with data about the 2014 elections and reorganised in order to apply longitudinal and event history analysis.

Date:1 Jan 2014 →  31 Dec 2017
Keywords:Personal campaign
Disciplines:Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology