Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for voter priming in multi-issue multi-party settings. We consider both parliamentary elections, where parties aim to maximize their share of votes, and various settings for presidential elections, where the winner takes all. For parliamentary elections, we show that pure equilibrium spending always exists and can be computed in time linear in the number of voters. For two parties and all settings, a spending equilibrium exists such that each party invests only in a single issue, and an equilibrium can be computed in time that is polynomial in the number of issues and linear in the number of voters. We also show that in most presidential settings no equilibrium exists. Additional properties of optimal campaign strategies are also studied.

翻译：议题显著性（issue salience）是影响选民决策的关键因素。候选人和政党通过竞选活动将议题显著性导向对自身有利的方向——这一过程被称为启动效应（priming）。本研究探讨了在多议题、多政党情境下，为引发选民启动效应而进行的竞选资金投入的动态过程、策略及均衡。我们既考虑了以最大化得票率为目标的议会选举，也分析了多种“赢者通吃”的总统选举情境。针对议会选举，我们证明纯策略均衡的竞选资金分配总是存在，且其计算时间与选民数量呈线性关系。对于两党竞争的所有情境，存在一种均衡使得每个政党仅投资于单一议题，且该均衡的计算时间与议题数量呈多项式关系、与选民数量呈线性关系。我们还证明，在大多数总统选举情境中并不存在此类均衡。此外，本文亦研究了最优竞选策略的其他性质。