A presentation on Steven D Levitt's paper "Using Repeat CHallengers to Estimate the Effect of Campaign SPending on Election Outcomes in the US House"

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

2. Does campaign money influence results?
- During election times, political office candidates use large amounts of money
to improve their chances of election
- Candidates assume that campaign spending increases their chances of
winning an election
- Levitt seeks to understand the role of money in politics, the determinants of
electoral competition, and the design of campaign finance reform

3. Specification flaws in the Literature
- Most studies have used cross-sectional data
- Levitt argues cross-sectional data did not allow for an ability to control for
candidate quality and district-specific factors in elections
- Past studies typically find:
- Large positive effect for challenger spending
- Small effect for incumbent spending
- Use of panel data allow for the control of omitted variable bias present in
cross-sectional studies

4. Data and Panel Data Strategy
- Data: All US House elections from 1972 to 1990 restricted to repeated
electoral competitions (i.e., a subset of elections that includes only those
where candidates face each other more than once)
- This allows for a specification (∆) that controls for candidate quality and
district-specific effects (limitations of cross-sectional studies)

5. Models and Variables
1. Cross-sectional
2. Difference
Unobserved

6. Cross-sectional results

7. Panel data results

8. Representativeness