Investigating Elite Behavior Through Field Experiments: Do Candidates Answer More to Core or Swing Voters?

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Most field experiments in social science analyze mass behavior. In this paper we explore the possibility of using experimental design to analyze elite behaviors. We provide an experimental strategy based on a modified “c.v. Experiment” to study the behavior of candidates during elections. To our knowledge this is the first field experiment on candidates during elections. The objective of this inquiry is to understand if electoral candidates target specific type of voters (swing or core). An e-mail letter experiment had been replicated two times in different countries and in different type of elections. In the first implementation, Italian national election 2006, 500 candidates of the two major parties were contacted by randomly generated voters that identified themselves as core voters or swing voters. Additionally, we employed a control treatment with no reference to the elections to identify the baseline answer rate and we randomized senders' past voting behavior and their gender. We replicated the experiment in the 2008 Brazilian municipal elections, contacting more than a 1.000 candidates. While in the Italian case politicians target mainly swing voters, in the Brazilian case we cannot detect any significant difference between the answer rates of core and swing voters. In the Brazilian case we find that any sender that identified himself as a potential voter was targeted. The paper contributes to the general experimental literature by providing an easy replicable design that can test the behavior of any elite interacting with the public. At the same time, the paper extends the literature on core and swing voters by providing an empirical test and a non-experimental comparison across countries that can shed light on the effects of different political environments (type of election, voting rule, party structure) and how they affect the relationship between candidates and voters during elections.