Does campaign length matter? Testing for cross-national effects

Our findings suggest that there are systematic differences in the ways that voters use the real values of economic variables when casting a vote depen ding on how long they have had to learn about the true state of the economy . It is possible that in campaigns of sufficient length voters may have mor e time to be exposed to competing campaign messages and to learn about the true state of the economy and the true policy positions of candidates. We t ested this assertion on 113 elections in thirteen democracies. The test res ults in a confirmation of the hypothesis. In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their eval uations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.