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Research about the impact of campaign spending on election outcomes in state legislative races falls into one of two categories. One approach focuses on the different effects incumbent and challenger spending has on the final vote. This approach has been called the incumbency-based approach. The second approach, termed the party-based approach, examines differences in the effects of spending by Republicans and Democrats.

Some of the earlier research on the party-based approach concludes that state legislative election outcomes are largely dictated by partisanship. They argue that success in these races is contingent upon being able to “bring home the votes” through support from political parties, and the intensity of campaign efforts. According to their study, voting outcomes are most greatly affected by expenditures, partisan strength, and incumbency respectively. While expenditures account for the largest changes in terms of absolute size, the study concludes that because both Democrats and Republicans candidates typically spend comparable amounts, their efforts nearly balance. Furthermore, they argue that because state legislative races are less salient than congressional or presidential races, the label of a political party plays and even greater role. Thus, partisan loyalties should translate into outcomes.

Research about the effects of campaign activities and spending has led to different conclusions. One of the early studies conducted about state legislative campaigns concludes that partisanship, not incumbency, is the most crucial dimension of electoral conflict at the state level. According to this research, state level elections are not the result of voters mindlessly returning incumbents to office as is the case in congressional elections. Instead, success in these less salient elections is contingent upon mobilizing partisan electorates. However, while this study suggests that partisanship plays the most crucial role, it does find that incumbency is still important in influencing outcomes for a variety of reasons.

The findings of this study are challenged in slightly more recent article. The criticisms are based on what the authors argue are flaws in the empirical analysis. First, they contend that Caldeira and Patterson’s (1982) study underestimates the importance of expenditures because to few elections were examined in to few states. To remedy this, Gierzynski and Breaux expand the data set to include twelve states across three elections. This allows them to examine the different effects of expenditures across states and time. Second, they decided to use a different indicator to measure partisan strength in districts. Rather than using voter registration, as Caldeira and Patterson (1982) did, they measure it by averaging the challenger’s party vote over three elections. They also included both of the states previously examined, so that they could compare the results of the two models. The conclusions from the research support the authors’ predictions. As they expected, the impact of campaign expenditures varies from state to state and from election to election. As a result there are some significant discrepancies between the findings of the two studies. While Caldeira and Patterson (1982) found a two percent difference the net effect of expenditures in one Iowa election, Gierzynski and Breaux found a sixteen percent advantage over the course of three elections. Their study concludes that in seven of the twelve states studied, the most important factor influencing outcomes was the percentage difference in expenditures between Democrats and Republicans.

Both studies emphasize the importance of both party strength and expenditures. The difference is that one emphasizes the importance of partisanship more than expenditures (Caldeira & Patterson 1982), while the other emphasizes the importance of expenditures more than party strength (Gierzynski & Breaux, 1993). Regarding expenditures, both studies also found that the principle of diminishing marginal returns was applicable- the effect of spending tails off at a certain point. Finally, in both studies, the indicator of campaign activities used is campaign expenditures. This could be problematic as it fails to account for the importance of campaign activities, which can play a valuable role without costing much money. For example, door knocking an entire district.

The last method for analyzing the impact of expenditures is the incumbency-based approach. This approach investigates the degree and causes of the incumbent advantage in various states across several state legislative elections. Findings from a 2000 study highlight a large incumbent advantage, similar to that in congress, based on several factors. The study concludes that the most influential variables in state elections are the make-up of districts, with the incumbent advantage being more significant in single member than multi-member districts. They found the second more important factor to be term length, with the incumbency advantage being inversely related to term length. Finally, unlike previous research that found legislative professionalism to offer the greatest incumbency advantage, these authors found institutionalization to be the least important variable.