Money and votes : the cost of election for first-time Finnish MPs

Authors

• David Arter

Abstract

In the wake of recent changes to the rules governing election funding in Finland, this article fo­cuses on the campaign spending of the 200 ‘winning candidates’ at the 2007 Eduskunta election and in particular those strong challenger candidates who became first-time parliamentarians. It addresses three basic questions. 1) Did the costs of election exceed the costs of re-election? 2) Did the extent of intra-partisan rivalry inflate the costs of election? 3) Did ‘candidate type’ affect the cost of election? Three hypotheses structure the discussion, which concludes inter alia that in the three larger parties the campaign budgets of ‘first-timers’ exceeded ‘returnees’, but that among the newcomers ‘candidate type’ mattered. Throughout, the paper draws on the comparative litera­ture dealing with the impact of electoral systems and the effect of both inter- and intra-partisan competition on candidate campaign expenditure. The concluding section sets out a future research agenda.