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Cited by 441

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 11 of the 11 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House

Levitt, Steven D.·1994·Journal of Political Economy

Abstract

Previous studies of congressional spending have typically found a large positive effect of challenger spending but little evidence for effects of incumbent spending. Those studies, however, do not adequately control for inherent differences in vote-getting ability across candidates. "High-quality" challengers are likely to receive a high fraction of the vote and have high campaign expenditures, even if campaign spending has no impact on election outcomes. To avoid that bias, this paper examines elections in which the same two candidates face one another on more than one occasion; differencing eliminates the influence of any fixed candidate or district attributes. Estimates of the effects of challenger spending are an order of magnitude below those of previous studies. Campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending. Campaign spending limits appear socially desirable, but public financing of campaigns does not.

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Metadata

Authors
Levitt, S. D.
Venue
Journal of Political Economy
Published
1994-08
Volume
102
Issue
4
Pages
777-798
ISSN
  • 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-534X
OpenAlex
W2158057241
Cited by
441
References
11
FWCI
8.38
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/261954
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Levitt, S. D. (1994). Using Repeat Challengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign Spending on Election Outcomes in the U.S. House. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/261954

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.