Cherry Picking at the 2015 Swiss Federal Elections: The Influence of Electoral Campaigns on Panachage

Our contribution analyses the influence of electoral campaigning on candidates’ success at the 2015 Swiss elections to the National Council. Concretely, we ask whether and to what extent the intensity and content of a candidate’s campaign exerts a persuasive effect on voters. In doing so, we make use of a rather unique setting in Switzerland, allowing voters to add candidates from other parties and lists on their selected party-list (panachage). Using the amount of votes a candidate received from voters favoring other parties or lists gives us an idea about a candidate’s persuasive potential to gain votes outside his classical voter segment. We assess a candidate’s campaign based on a collection of almost 4,000 political advertisements gathered in 50 important supraregional and regional newspapers covering all 26 cantons, i.e. electoral districts. The influence of the electoral campaign is examined using hierarchical modeling, enabling us to control for other important individual and contextual determinants of electoral success - such as incumbency, position on a party’s list or size of the voting district.