It Takes Money to Make MPs: Evidence from 160 Years of British Campaign Spending
利用1857年至2017年英国大选的新数据集，研究了竞选支出与得票率之间相关性的长期变化，发现自1880年代以来相关性显著增强，并与新信息技术（如地方广播和互联网）及竞选策略变革有关。
We study electoral campaigns over the long run, through the lens of their spending. We build a novel, exhaustive dataset on U.K. general elections from 1857 to 2017. We provide quantitative insights on the history of campaigns, including the shift away from paid staff toward advertising. We then show that the correlation between candidate spending and votes has strongly increased since the 1880s, peaking in the last quarter of the twentieth century. We link this pattern to the introduction of new information technologies—in particular, local radio and the Internet—and to the transformations of campaign strategies.