Strategic positioning and elections: Issue selection and negative campaigning

The intersection of politics and economics has been largely limited to the study of institutions and policy outcomes. Here I offer another similarity, political campaigning. Because campaigns are competitive events with imperfect information, constraints, and multiple strategies, economic analysis can lead to new insights.; Here economic methods are used to analyze campaign phenomena. The first chapter, "Why negative campaigning? The chaotic dynamics of an election," studies how adding issues during a campaign can defeat an opponent who is located at an unbeatable position. The result hinges on the existence of what is commonly known as a "core" in spatial voting theory. A core is a position that is unbeatable. This chapter also introduces a new solution concept, the Finesse Point (Saari & Asay (2006)), which allows a candidate to pick an optimal location, given uncertainty about an opponent's future position.; The next chapter, "Does negative campaigning necessarily lead to more news coverage," uses a new data set to examine the empirical relationship between candidate advertising tone and newspaper coverage. In general, advertising expenditure is not positively associated with news coverage. However, a specific form of campaign advertising, negative advertising, is positively associated with news coverage at the beginning of the campaign. After that, negative advertising is associated with lower news coverage. These results coincide with media values theory: negative campaigning is expected to increase news coverage because it highlights the conflict in a campaign. I also find that other political events (for instance fund raisers for candidates) strongly predict news coverage. Further, Democrats tend to receive less coverage than Republicans.; The last chapter uses a new solution concept, the Constrained Strong Point, to show how constraints alter the two candidate spatial model of voting. A constraint is a boundary that a candidate cannot pass. Examples of constraints are past stated positions or party ideology---candidates must stay within the boundary formed by ideology of their respective parties. I find that candidates who are constrained on one issue are implicitly constrained on other issues. When issues are economic in nature, constraints provide economic interpretations. Finally, when constraints are strong enough, they yield unbeatable positions.