Advertising and Political Expenditures in a Spatial Election Game: An Experimental Investigation

Most researchers agree that the role of money in politics is important, however, there is no agreement on the extent to which money influences electoral outcomes and governmental policies. One reason for this discord is that the existing research concentrates on aggregate level studies. Therefore, this literature cannot tell us anything about the effects of money on individual decision-making. Only recently have spatial models, which examine the interactions of individual decisions within an institutional context, begun to consider the importance of money and politics. However, as the case with most spatial models, there are no existing "real-world " data to test the hypotheses that are derived. Consequently, researchers have relied on laboratory experiments to test the robustness of these models. This essay presents a series of experiments that examine the effects of advertising and political contributions in a sequential spatial election game, given that candidates have equal resources and their positions are fixed. These conditions model the classical prisoner's dilemma game in which both candidates would be better off if they cooperated and choose not to advertise. The results showed that candidates who advertised the most, generally won the most elections.

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