MPs' Expenditure and General Election Campaigns: Do Incumbents Benefit from Contacting their Constituents?
| Author | Charles Pattie,Ron Johnston |
| Date | 01 October 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2008.00757.x |
| Published date | 01 October 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
MPs’ Expenditure and General Election
Campaigns: Do Incumbents Benefit from
Contacting their Constituents?post_757580..591
Ron Johnston Charles Pattie
University of Bristol University of Sheffield
Most studies of the impact of local campaign expenditure on British election results have found that
expenditure by incumbents has less of an effect on the outcome than does that by challengers.Some argue
that this, in part,reflects an underestimate of how much is spent by incumbents because it excludes their
expenditure under various parliamentary allowances which facilitates contacts between MPs and their
constituents. Data on spending under those allowances are now availableand are used here to evaluate its
impact at the 2005 general election in England. The analyses show that only expenditure by Conservative
MPs had any impact on their re-election chances.
Many studies of the impact of campaign spending on election outcomes, in a
range of countries including the UK, have found that incumbents get a smaller
return on their expenditure than do challengers (Moon, 2006, discusses this for
the US case; for the UK,see Denver and Hands, 1997;Johnston and Pattie, 1997;
Pattie and Johnston, 2008). One reason for this difference, it is suggested, is the
availability of other campaigning resources to incumbents but not also to their
challengers – such as expenditure of public funds by MPs in the course of their
parliamentary duties which involves contact with their constituents;analyses that
exclude these therefore understate the intensity and perhaps also the impact of
incumbent campaigning (as originally suggested by Jacobson, 1978; 1990). It has
not been possible to evaluate this claim in the UK until recently,because data on
the amount spent by incumbent MPs associated with their parliamentary duties
have not been available. Such data are now published, and are deployed in this
note to explore the argument’s validity.
This issue has more than academic interest, because the amount spent by incum-
bent MPs and their challengers has been a focus of recent debates regarding the
regulation of party funding. After the 2005 general election, several defeated
Labour MPs claimed that they had lost their seats to Conservative challengers
who had received large donations to promote their local campaigns. Analyses
suggest that this argument had veracity, and that candidates in receipt of such
donations did perform better than others; the additional expenditure stimulated
a greater yield of votes ( Johnston and Pattie,2007). To counter this, members of
the Labour party have argued that the amount spent in constituencies should be
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2008.00757.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2009 VOL 57, 580–591
© 2008The Authors. Journal compilation © 2008 Political StudiesAssociation
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