Essays on the economics of political campaigns

This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on campaign effects, a large portion of which has been devoted to supporting or debunking the conclusions of the early studies: campaign effects are minimal. Different approaches have been taken overtime, including alternative measures of campaign effects and econometric specifications, as well as the use of idiosyncratic data sets. Currently, there are no universally accepted conclusions, nor standardized theoretical and empirical frameworks to analyze the campaign effects phenomenon. Chapter 2 develops a model of campaign information in the context of social networks. The model endogenizes the decision to share information within a voter's community and explains vote switching as a result of this. The model assumes that voters live in an exogenously determined community and are randomly exposed to noisy information about the political environment. Agents can then choose to share their information; this decision is a function of the expected benefits from interacting with their community, and the cost of doing so. The model shows how prior beliefs and signal precision determine a threshold for disagreement before a voter decides to switch, and establishes conditions for the existence of pure strategy equilibria for different networking cost intervals. These results are consistent with the data from the American National Election Study 2000. Chapter 3 analyzes information transmission in an electoral context when political parties cannot make policy commitments and the state of the world is unobservable for both parties and voters. This chapter shows that no information transmission can occur if voters are not provided with some noisy private information of their own. When this occurs, there exists an equilibrium where party announcements with respect to the state of the world truthfully reveal their private information. This chapter extends previous results where information transmission was possible under parties with extreme ideological preferences and, more importantly, with the ability to commit to policy platforms.