tl;dr: the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all
This is from Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt; Stephen J. Dubner
Certainly money influences elections. Does it buy it. It could, but most time it doesn’t. IMHO.
If it can’t buy love, I don’t see why it can buy an election.
To the OP: Can you clarify what are your own words and what are your quoting from Freakonomics? And how did they collect their data?
That’s the point of the research in the OP - the influence of money on elections (beyond a minimum amount that is needed to make the candidate’s name known I presume) is miniscule.
After the first two lines in the OP, the rest is from “Freakonomics”.
As for the data - don’t know the exact source. Here is a bit from an article about Levitt:
Sometimes he would begin with a question. Sometimes it was a set of data that caught his eye. He spent one entire summer typing into his computer the results of years’ worth of Congressional elections. (Today, with so much information so easily available on the Internet, Levitt complains that he can’t get his students to input data at all.) All he had was a vague curiosity about why incumbents were so often re-elected.
Then he happened upon a political-science book whose authors claimed that money wins elections, period. “They were trying to explain election outcomes as a function of campaign expenditures,” he recalls, “completely ignoring the fact that contributors will only give money to challengers when they have a realistic chance of winning, and incumbents only spend a lot when they have a chance of losing. They convinced themselves this was the causal story even though it’s so obvious in retrospect that it’s a spurious effect.”
Obvious, at least, to Levitt. Within five minutes, he had a vision of the paper he would write. “It came to me,” he says, “in full bloom.”
The problem was that his data couldn’t tell him who was a good candidate and who wasn’t. It was therefore impossible to tease out the effect of the money. As with the police/crime rate puzzle, he had to trick the data.
Because he himself had typed in the data, he had noticed something: often, the same two candidates faced each other multiple times. By analyzing the data from only those elections, Levitt was able to find a true result. His conclusion: campaign money has about one-tenth the impact as was commonly accepted.
Terr, I’ve shortened the quote you posted. We take pains to respect copyright here, and it was simply too long. If you can link to the article or a summary, that would be better.
Here’s a link: http://books.google.com/books?id=wNPnl5zYA-cC&pg=PT19&&hl=en&ei=bTfkTunnFare0QGYwtjdBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&f=false - starting halfway down the page
Great. I’ve added the link to your OP.
Ask steve forbes or ross perot. You certainly need money to get your message out there. But if that message doesn’t resonate with people it doesn’t matter if you are a billionare
I fervently wish to believe you Terr, but I do not. Conservatives claiming that money does not buy elections is an innately suspicious thing, and distinctly counterintuitive.
This was not written by me. The research was done by Dr. Levitt - “Winner of the 2004 John Bates Clark Medal, he is currently the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, director of the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.” - and as far as I know, not a conservative.
Here is another interesting article by another economist:
Every two years, public-interest groups and media pundits lament the fact that winning candidates typically far outspend their rivals. They infer from this that campaign spending drives electoral results. Most systematic studies, however, find no effect of marginal campaign spending on the electoral success of candidates.
…
Are campaign contributions the functional equivalent of bribes? The conventional wisdom is that donors must get something for their money, but decades of academic research on Congress has failed to uncover any systematic evidence that this is so. Indeed, legislators tend to act in accordance with the interests of their donors, but this is not because of some quid pro quo. Instead, donors tend to give to like-minded candidates.
…
Political and legal decision makers have for too long considered the role of money in politics to be self-evident; this has led to a widespread and pervasive misunderstanding of the likely costs and benefits of campaign finance reform proposals. But political institutions are no less subject to scientific inquiry than are social or economic institutions. The consensus among academic researchers is that money is far less important in determining either election or policy outcomes than conventional wisdom holds it to be. Consequently, the benefits of campaign finance reforms have also been exaggerated.
I have nothing better to do, sitting up seeing if my 6-months-old will wake up and cry - so I found another fun paper: http://arpejournal.com/ARPEvolume7number1-2/Gius.pdf
This one, apart from claiming that “spending by either candidate has a minimal effect on the vote share obtained”, also finds that incumbent campaign spending has a negative effect on the vote he gets and “an incumbent’s best political strategy may be too (sic) lay low and not advertise very much is at all”.
I think the question shouldn’t be can you buy an election. It should be phrased as does EXTRA money help in an election. Certainly you need a great deal of money just to campaign and get your message out.
But the real question is does pumping any more money into that message help once you get over that first rung. And the answer to that seems to be no
If money means little in elections and candidates can no longer keep unspent campaing contributions then why do politicians spend so much of their time raising money for their reelection campaigns?
But money can influence love also.
Money is the only real thing in any loving relationship. And in politics, too. Everything else is “message resonating with people”.
God, I love that expression so much I’ll paste it again - a message that resonates with people.
Think about it, Bush W. had a message that resonated with people and that’s how he became POTUS. Twice!
I had no idea that after all what’s happening right in front of people’s eyes and ears someone can still be so mentally removed from reality to claim that money and elections are independent of each other, that there is no clear functional relationship between the two. Or, just because you call it lobbying there is no corruption. Or, just because you call it “telling the truth” there is no pandering.
Even conceding that campaign funding has relatively small effect on election outcomes does not mean such money is not a pernicious influence. Politicians like big campaign budgets for other reasons than winning; for example it gives means for kickbacks or graft.
Campaign contributions influence a politician’s policies once elected. And big money has a big effect on the direction of political debate.
Remember, just because you’re cynical, it doesn’t mean you’re right.
Are campaign contributions the functional equivalent of bribes? The conventional wisdom is that donors must get something for their money, but decades of academic research on Congress has failed to uncover any systematic evidence that this is so. Indeed, legislators tend to act in accordance with the interests of their donors, but this is not because of some quid pro quo. Instead, donors tend to give to like-minded candidates.4 Of course, if candidates choose their policy positions in anticipation of a subsequent payoff in campaign contributions, there would be no real distinction between accepting bribes and accepting contributions from like-minded voters. However, studies of legislative behavior indicate that the most important determinants of an incumbent’s voting record are constituent interests, party, and personal ideology. In election years, constituent interests become more important than in nonelection years, but overall, these three factors explain nearly all of the variation in incumbents’ voting records.
… read more