TY - JOUR
T1 - Campaign messages, polling, and elections
T2 - theory and experimental evidence
AU - Feltovich, Nick
AU - Giovannoni, Francesco
N1 - Funding Information:
Financial support from Monash University and from the Australian Research Council (DP130101183) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Jon Eguia, Christos Ioannou, Dimitri Landa, Santiago Sánchez‐Pagés, three anonymous referees, and participants at several conferences and seminars for helpful suggestions and comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. American Journal of Political Science published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Midwest Political Science Association.
PY - 2024/4
Y1 - 2024/4
N2 - How do politicians’ track records and campaign messaging interact and affect voters’ welfare? We analyze this question theoretically and experimentally. In the theoretical model, which we implement in the experiment, politicians choose how much of an economy's resources to allocate to the citizenry—keeping the remainder for themselves—and then face reelection against a challenger. Both incumbents and challengers have private information about their own quality that determines the economy's level of resources. We vary whether candidates can send campaign messages and the level of variability in candidates’ quality. We observe that both higher-quality variability and allowing campaigning benefit citizens by allowing them to better select and hold accountable higher-quality officials. Also, when incumbents have performed poorly or when quality variability is high, challengers’ negative campaigning (criticizing the incumbent) increases and incumbents’ positive campaigning (emphasizing their own strengths) decreases.
AB - How do politicians’ track records and campaign messaging interact and affect voters’ welfare? We analyze this question theoretically and experimentally. In the theoretical model, which we implement in the experiment, politicians choose how much of an economy's resources to allocate to the citizenry—keeping the remainder for themselves—and then face reelection against a challenger. Both incumbents and challengers have private information about their own quality that determines the economy's level of resources. We vary whether candidates can send campaign messages and the level of variability in candidates’ quality. We observe that both higher-quality variability and allowing campaigning benefit citizens by allowing them to better select and hold accountable higher-quality officials. Also, when incumbents have performed poorly or when quality variability is high, challengers’ negative campaigning (criticizing the incumbent) increases and incumbents’ positive campaigning (emphasizing their own strengths) decreases.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85137973418&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/ajps.12722
DO - 10.1111/ajps.12722
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85137973418
SN - 0092-5853
VL - 68
SP - 408
EP - 426
JO - American Journal of Political Science
JF - American Journal of Political Science
IS - 2
ER -