David Samuels, "When Does Every Penny Count?" Intra-party Competition and Campaign Finance in Brazil," Party Politics, 7 (January 2001), 89-102.

First Paragraph:
Several scholars have recently drawn attention to the conditions under which candidates for office pursue a `personal vote'. This question is particularly interesting in electoral systems where many candidates from the same party compete in the same constituency. Given intra-party competition, candidates cannot rely solely on their party's label to win elections. Instead, they must attempt to differentiate themselves from their co-partisans as well as from other parties' candidates. One strategy to develop a `personal vote' support base under SNTV, Open-List PR, or other `candidate-centric' electoral systems, as Cox and Thies (1998) have recently argued, is to spend money.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: The Relationship between money and Political Competition p. 94
Figure 2: The Relationship between Money and Competition in Larger District Magnitudes p. 94
Table 1: The number of competitors and campaign spending in Brazil p. 97
Table 2: Measures of intra-party competition under open-list PR p. 98
Table 3: The Intensity of Competition and Campaign Spending in Brazil p. 99

Last Paragraph
Future research on the `personal vote' should also incorporate relative differences in candidates' ability to assess the information at their disposal, a question that is lacking from even the more formal-theoretic work on electoral systems (e.g. Cox, 1997; Myerson, 1993). In general terms, this study generates a number of questions about the consequences of variation in the quality of information that candidates can acquire under different electoral rules: different district magnitudes, variation in the number of competitors and other variables create different competitive environments for candidates. It is to this variation that scholars might turn in the continuing investigation of the sources and consequences of the quest for the `personal vote'.