Literature on electoral politics has observed a trend towards candidate-centered electoral systems (Pilet and Renwick, 2015). While candidates increasingly display personal vote-seeking behavior, voters are increasingly influenced by candidate-based attributes (Thijssen, 2013). Candidate-centered campaigning is usually measured using candidate survey-items on campaign instruments, communicative focus, and self-declared use of individual campaign means (De Winter and Baudewyns, 2014). While these indirect measures of campaign behavior are valuable for analysis, they are subject to classical shortcomings of survey research (e.g. social desirability).
Based on official campaign spending declarations of 12.814 candidates for Belgian federal and regional elections (1999-2014), we are able to use more direct measures of personalized campaign behavior. Moreover, these declarations also hold information on party financial support for individual candidates. This allows us to not only check which party candidates invest more personal money in their campaigns, but whether this personalized behavior is inversely proportional to party campaign support.
