Do Political Parties Pursue Similar Allocation Strategies?: Evidence from Unique Electoral Boundaries in Ontario.

The importance of spending money in elections and the limited resources available to political parties and candidates makes it reasonable to expect that parties strategically allocate resources to candidates (e.g., Schecter and Hedge 2001; Stonecash 1988; Pattie and Johnston 2009; Carty and Eagles 2005; Cross, 2004). While we find this literature to be quite informative, it is unclear how much local context affects the various strategies. Comparing party activity across levels of elections is challenging. One must worry about comparability of districts and other potential confounding factors. We expect that a significant advancement would be to employ a research design that "controls" the various constituency conditions across different types of elections in order to see whether similar political parties adopt the same strategy when facing the similar conditions. Using a real world situation from the province of Ontario, Canada, we evaluate party allocations when several provincial ridings (legislative districts) have the same boundaries as federal electoral districts. This boundary structure creates a rare opportunity for comparing party behavior in elections across levels of government while keeping most contextual factors the same (e.g., population). Our analysis focuses on party behavior during the 2003 provincial election and the 2004 federal election. Through this analysis, we determine that provincial and federal parties rarely adopt similar allocation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]