A question from a Monkey Cage reader:
Is there any research that looks at how the length of an electoral campaign (particularly presidential campaigns) is correlated with whether the incumbent wins or loses? I’m curious mostly because it seems that Obama has had a lot of time to reposition himself for the upcoming election in response to his prospective opponents ideas/views/etc., more time probably than incumbent candidates did mid-20th century or even in the last few decades, though the benefits of incumbency in all elections going back I don’t know how far is more than apparent.
I don’t have a good answer. This article by Randolph Stevenson and Lynn Vavreck looks at how the length of the campaign affects how much voters draw on economic fundamentals in making a decision. Their conclusion:
In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.
This result suggests that whether the length of a campaign helps or hurts an incumbent should depend on whether the underlying economy is strong or weak.
If readers know of other relevant studies on campaign length, please suggest them.
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I would guess that campaign length hasn’t varied significantly enough over time for the data to bear any real kinds of trends.
It does if you use multiple elections across various countries, as in Stevenson and Vavreck. But their study obviously doesn’t get at the U.S. case specifically, as per the reader’s query.
Isn’t campaign length endogenous? I mean, the higher the prob. of winning over the incumbet’s party (or the worst the state of tehe conomy), the longer the campaign?
This conclusion does seem to fit with other observations (e.g. Gelman and King 1993) that the campaign somehow reveals the fundamentals to voters, so it does matter, but not in the way pundits usually believe.