Campaign Messages and Strategic Adjustment in Multi-stage Elections

• In Event: Campaigns 1

Abstract

Do politicians strategically adjust their campaign messages under electoral competition and does it matter? In this paper we assess the extent to which electoral discourse responds to natural variation in the set of competitors a candidate faces in two-round elections. We exploit a unique dataset of about 30,000 manifestos circulated by candidates to the French legislative elections before each election round between 1958 and 1993. Using computational text analysis to scale these manifestos on a left-to-right axis, we show that candidates who make it to the runoff tend to moderate their discourse in the second round. This is particularly true among candidates who were more extreme in the first round but less so among incumbent and elected candidates. We further provide suggestive evidence that candidates strategically shift their campaign messages from national partisan politics to more consensual and self-centered statements to attract voters who did not support their platform in the first round.

Next, we use various approaches to map manifestos into legislative activity once elected. We find weak to zero correlation between the two, suggesting that neither campaign messages nor their adjustment in multi-stage elections are binding.

Author

• Caroline Le Pennec, University of California, Berkeley