Opponent Campaign Visits in Dominant Party Regimes

Scholars often study changes in electoral outcomes in places visited by political candidates to estimate the impact of campaign visits. However, this approach doesn’t consider biases caused by other campaign interventions that occur concurrently with visits and might directly influence election results. This article examines the local effects of Henrique Capriles Radonsky’s 2012 visits during the 2012 and 2013 presidential elections against Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. I utilize data on Capriles’ spatial priorities when allocating campaign resources. By controlling for these priorities in a difference-in-differences specification, I find that the estimated causal effect of visits on Chavista support decreases by over 80%. While the estimated effect of visits is small, they seem to facilitate the spread of persuasive information about Capriles and seem to act as substitutes for other interventions.