Campaign Expenditures and Political Competition

Abstract

THE theory of public choice emphasizes the role of economic assumptions in the mechanisms which generate political choices.1 In a recent contribution to this literature, Stigler has suggested that the "all-or-nothing" characterization of political competition is both unappealing and unrealistic. He is sympathetic to a basic similarity between political and economic competition, where, like the latter, the products of a political process (public policy) can be construed as ranging continuously from failure to success.2 Stigler notes that there has been a tendency to label (incorrectly) the winning of 51 per cent of legislative seats a victory and 49 per cent a defeat and argues that the success of a political party is "more or less," not all-or-none. Thus, the importance of a continuous characterization of political outcomes is that it reduces the apparent fundamental differences which have exacerbated the extent of the analogy between economic and political competition.3