The Power of an Hour: Effects of Candidate Time Expenditure in State Legislative Elections

• Date: 01 May 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12116
• Author: Michael G. Miller
• Published date: 01 May 2016

MICHAEL G. MILLER

Barnard College, Columbia University

The Power of an Hour: Effects

of Candidate Time Expenditure

in State Legislative Elections

Using survey data from more than 500 legislative candidates in 17 states during

the 2008 election, I examine whether state house candidates who devote more time to

their campaign win a larger share of the major-party vote. Consistent with previous

work studying campaign spending in state legislative elections, I find a positive and sig-

nificant association between campaign time and vote percentage for challengers—but

not incumbents—in incumbent-contested elections.

A considerable amount of research has sought to determine

whether and how campaign spending affects election outcomes. Chal-

lengers’ spending is commonly found to be an important determinant of

their electoral success, but there is less evidence that incumbent spending

affects the results of either congressional or state legislative elections.

While this is good news for challengers, money is typically not easy for

them to raise, and challengers in legislative elections at both the federal

and state level tend to f‌ind themselves outspent by incumbents. Candi-

dateswhof‌indthemselvesinsuchcircumstancesarelikelytoturnto

another resource to make up the difference: their own labor.

For all the attention to the effect of spending, there have been few

studies of the personal effort of political candidates (but see Howell

1982). In this article, I leverage an original survey of state legislative can-

didates f‌ielded during the 2008 election to determine whether candidates

are able to win votes through hard work. There is little to impede an

industrious challenger from expending effort on time-intensive voter-

contact methods. If such methods are effective means of increasing can-

didates’ vote totals, then a thrifty challenger might f‌ind success if he or

she is willing to devote a large amount of time to the campaign, even

when outspent. Understanding the effect of campaign time therefore con-

tributes to a fuller understanding of how political campaigns shape

preferences and/or mobilize voters.

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 2, May 2016 327

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12116

V

C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

My analysis yields f‌indings consistent with much of the existing

work on the effects of campaign spending. While incumbents who

devote more time to their campaign do not realize signif‌icant vote gains,

challengers’ campaign efforts result in positive and signif‌icant increases

in their vote share. Specif‌ically, a challenger who increases the number

of weekly hours spent campaigning can expect to realize a signif‌icant

gain in his or her share of the general election vote. This f‌inding is robust

to various aggregations of campaign time, and the observed effect of

time on vote percentage is independent of the percentage of money in

the race raised by the challenger. Thus, the results suggest that especially

in close races, challengers can swing the outcome by expending a large

amount of their own time on various tasks. In total, these f‌indings

advance our understanding of campaign effects, particularly in the

context of state legislative elections.

Campaign Resources and Votes

Since candidates must expend f‌inancial resources in order to do

just about anything intended to garner votes, much existing work has

focused on how campaign spending affects a candidate’s electoral

success. A great deal of research has determined that congressional chal-

lengers realize vote gains from their campaign spending, while

incumbents’ spending does little to increase their vote share (e.g.,

Ansolabehere and Gerber 1994; Jacobson 1978, 1980, 1990).

1

The dis-

parate effects for incumbent and challenger spending in congressional

contests is largely consistent with analysis of state legislative elections:

studies in a range of states and years have generally held that while cam-

paign spending in state legislative contests leads to more votes on

average, challengers typically realize higher gains-per-dollar than incum-

bents–but the marginal returns of their spending diminish as more

money is spent (Caldeira and Patterson 1982; Cassie and Breaux 1998;

Gierzynski and Breaux 1991; Giles and Pritchard 1985; Glantz,

Abramowitz, and Burkart 1976; Owens and Olson 1977; Tucker and

Weber 1987; Welch 1976).

Even if challengers do receive a greater benef‌it from spending than

incumbents, they still face a diff‌icult task. Incumbents enjoy a clear elec-

toral advantage over their competition in both federal and state elections

(Ansolabehere and Snyder 2002). Part of this advantage is certainly

monetary: while incumbents can easily raise funds as needed to combat

a strong challenge—and therefore generally control more money than

their competition at all phases of an election—challengers who fail

to raise funds early rarely exhibit success later (Krasno, Green, and

328 Michael G. Miller

Cowden 1994). Challengers’ ability to raise money is at least partially

constrained by prospective donors’ assessments of their viability, as they

must often confront the paradoxical reality that donors are less likely to

contribute to them due to concerns about their likelihood of winning, but

they cannot win without money.

Hard work might offer challengers a solution to this problem.

Compared to a money supply limited by donor skepticism or contribu-

tion regulations, the candidate is likely to possess much greater control

on the amount of time he or she personally devotes to the campaign.

Absent personal obligations, for candidates who are not required to

work, the only external constraint on campaign time is the number of

hours in a day; even those with full-time jobs have the ability to invest at

least some time into the campaign each week. Thus, even in elections

where strong incumbents face inexperienced challengers, there is often

little to stop the latter from spending some amount of time canvassing

precincts, courting interest groups, writing emails and blog posts, or

phoning voters.

2

With eff‌icient use of campaign time, a challenger might

therefore parlay increased visibility from a low-cost “shoe leather”

campaign into viability.

The good news for challengers is that even low-cost methods of

mass mobilization can be effective, so long as the message is well-

targeted and/or delivered in an intimate fashion. For instance, a positive

effect on turnout has been demonstrated when phone solicitations come

from volunteers who engage voters in a personal way (Nickerson 2005;

Nickerson, Friedrichs, and King 2006; Ramirez 2005; Wong 2005).

Face-to-face canvassing techniques appear to be particularly effective

mobilization methods (Bennion 2005; Gerber and Green 2000; Green,

Gerber, Michelson 2003; and Nickerson 2003; Niven 2001, 2002; Parry

et al. 2008). Thus, even in the absence of much money, most candidates

have the means to effectively reach voters if they are willing to work.

This is particularly true in state legislative elections, which are more

likely than congressional ones to feature personal methods of voter

contact—such as handing voters a handbill on their doorstep—over

mass media campaigning (Hogan 1997).

While canvassing and phoning are less expensive means of voter

contact than television advertising, they do impart their own unique

costs. Specif‌ically, personal voter contact is labor-intensive and places

substantial demands on a candidate’s time. The impact of such efforts is

therefore likely to depend on candidates’ willingness to invest a signif‌i-

cant amount of personal time in them. For instance, a candidate who

devotes more effort to door-to-door canvassing will meet more people,

share more information, and have the opportunity to persuade more

329The Power of an Hour