IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crs/wpaper/2016-28.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Campaign spending and legislative election outcomes: Exploiting the French political financing reforms of the mid-1990s

Author

Listed:
  • Abel François

    () (University of Lille 1, Télécom ParisTech)

  • Michael Visser

    () (CREST, ENSAE, CRED)

  • Lionel WILNER

    () (CREST, ENSAE)

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of campaign spending on votes in French legislative elections. We exploit the political nancing 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 the maximal amount of personal expenditures reimbursed by the State was augmented. We have data on two consecutive elections (one before and one after the reforms) and focus on candidates who competed in both of them. We find that the difference in candidates' campaign expenses across elections is strongly affected by the reforms. We then estimate a structural vote equation using panel data to control for unobserved characteristics of candidates. Spending has a statistically signi cant effect, but only for challengers.

Suggested Citation

  • Abel François & Michael Visser & Lionel WILNER, 2016. "Campaign spending and legislative election outcomes: Exploiting the French political financing reforms of the mid-1990s," Working Papers 2016-28, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.
    • Handle: RePEc:crs:wpaper:2016-28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://crest.science/RePEc/wpstorage/2016-28.pdf
    File Function: Crest working paper version
    Download Restriction: no

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Campaign Spending; Elections; Political Financing Reforms;

    JEL classification:

    • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crs:wpaper:2016-28. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sri Srikandan). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/crestfr.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.