The Politician and the Vote Factory : How Funding Sources Lead to an Efficient Election Campaign?

This paper uses a new database on campaign funding on French members of parliament to analyze their efficiency. The database includes the level of funding, as well as the origin of the resources the politicians have at their disposal. The funding sources are identified with true resources used by the candidates. This allows us to use DEA methods to first provide efficiency estimates for elected candidates and, secondly to assess the determinants of the efficiency scores through a regression analysis. Results show a large variance in campaign resource efficiency, particularly between political parties, but also between incumbents and newcomers