Timing Is Everything? Primacy and Recency Effects in Voter Mobilization Campaigns

The timing of message delivery in political campaigns is a key component of strategy. Yet studies that examine the impact of message timing on political behavior are surprisingly rare. Although one recent study finds that appeals delivered closer to Election Day will be most effective (Nickerson, American Journal of Political Science 51(2):269–282, 2007), methodological considerations render this conclusion tentative and suggest the impact of message timing remains an open question. In this paper I report the results of a randomized field experiment designed to compare the mobilization effects of nonpartisan messages delivered via commercial phone banks at different points during a campaign cycle. The results of the experiment, conducted during the November 2005 municipal elections in Rochester, New York, suggest calls delivered early on during a campaign cycle can also be effective.     

Assessing the Impact of Alternative Voting Technologies on Multi-Party Elections: Design Features,Heuristic Processing and Voter Choice

This paper analyzes the influence of alternative voting technologies on electoral outcomes in multi-party systems. Using data from a field experiment conducted during the 2005 legislative election in Argentina, we examine the role of information effects associated with alternative voting devices on the support for the competing parties. We find that differences in the type of information displayed and how it was presented across devices favored some parties to the detriment of others. The impact of voting technologies was found to be larger than in two-party systems, and could lead to changes in election results. We conclude that authorities in countries moving to adopt new voting systems should carefully take the potential partisan advantages induced by different technologies into account when evaluating their implementation.     

Taking Sides in Other People’s Elections: The Polarizing Effect of Foreign Intervention

What do voters think when outside powers become de facto participants in a country’s election? We conceptualize two types of foreign intervention: a partisan stance, where the outsider roots for a particular candidate slate, and a process stance, where outsiders support the democratic process. We theorize that a partisan outside message will polarize partisan actors domestically on the issue of appropriate relations with the outsiders: partisans who are supported will want closer relations with the outside power, and partisans who are opposed will favor more distant relations. A process message, in contrast, will have a moderating effect on voters’ attitudes. We present evidence of partisan polarization along those lines from a survey experiment we conducted in Lebanon in the wake of the 2009 parliamentary elections. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies of how outsiders can encourage moderate electoral outcomes in democratizing states.     

Campaign Targets and Messages in Direct Mail Fundraising

Political campaigns raise millions of dollars each election cycle. While past research provides valuable insight into who these donors are and why they are motivated to give, little research takes into account the actions of political campaigns. This paper examines why and how campaigns target habitual donors for political donations. Using the 2004 Campaign Communication Survey, a national survey of registered voters who were asked to collect and send in all campaign mail they received during the last 3 weeks of a campaign, we show that campaigns send donation solicitations predominantly to individuals who have previously donated to a campaign. We also show that campaigns match targeting fundraising appeals to the potential motivations for giving: campaigns target the type of fundraising appeal they use, whether ideological, solidary, or material, to match the socioeconomic and partisan characteristics of the potential donor. The implication of effective targeting is that the “unequal” voice of participation in campaign contributions is not one-sided and simply resource based, but rather that campaigns also contribute to the situation with targeted messages to potential donors.     

Affective polarization and the salience of elections

In this article we analyze the effects of election salience on affective polarization. Campaigns and elections epitomize the moment of maximum political conflict, information spread, mobilization, and activation of political identities and predispositions. We therefore expect that affective polarization will be higher just after an election has taken place. By the same token, as elections lose salience, affective polarization will diminish. We analyze this question using CSES data from 99 post-electoral surveys conducted in 42 countries between 1996 and 2016. Our identification strategy exploits variation in the timing of survey interviews with respect to the election day as an exogenous measure of election salience. The empirical findings indicate that as elections lose salience affective polarization declines. The article further contributes to the debate on the origins of affective polarization by exploring two mechanisms that may account for this relationship: changes in ideological polarization and in the intensity of party identification. Both are relevant mediators, with ideological polarization seemingly playing a more important role.     

Partisanship, Political Control, and Economic Assessments

Previous research shows that partisans rate the economy more favorably when their party holds power. There are several explanations for this association, including use of different evaluative criteria, selective perception, selective exposure to information, correlations between economic experiences and partisanship, and partisan bias in survey responses. We use a panel survey around the November 2006 election to measure changes in economic expectations and behavioral intentions after an unanticipated shift in political power. Using this design, we can observe whether the association between partisanship and economic assessments holds when some leading mechanisms thought to bring it about are excluded. We find that there are large and statistically significant partisan differences in how economic assessments and behavioral intentions are revised immediately following the Democratic takeover of Congress. We conclude that this pattern of partisan response suggests partisan differences in perceptions of the economic competence of the parties, rather than alternative mechanisms.     

Echoing certainty in uncertain times: Network partisan agreement and the quality of citizen forecasts in the 2015 Canadian election

Citizens, especially in the aggregate, have historically been excellent election forecasters. This is, in part, due to discussing and hearing about the voting intentions of those around them, i.e., learning from their social networks. However, many people interact with networks that are ideological “echo chambers” made up of only likeminded voters. Does this absence of political disagreement decrease the ability of citizens to accurately predict an election result? Using a survey module from the 2015 Canadian Local Parliament Project, we examine how citizens living in partisan echo chambers fare at forecasting at the riding and parliamentary level and find that the reliability of echo chamber dwellers’ forecasts declines relative to those in more diverse environs. Our findings suggest that the role played by partisan composition of social networks is critical to understanding the accuracy and confidence of citizen electoral forecasts.     

Campaign advertising and political ambiguity

This paper develops a model to explain candidates' strategic decisions to provide or withhold information about policy positions in the course of an election campaign. The analysis treats this problem as a game of imperfect information. Attention is focused on modeling voter suspicion of candidates whose positions are ambiguous. Specific numerical examples illustrate that candidate decisions about providing information via informative advertising depend upon candidate policy preferences, campaign fund endowments, partisan reputations, and incumbency status. The model also provides theoretical underpinnings for empirical findings regarding the effects of campaign advertising.     

Partisan Sorting and Niche Parties in Europe

Earlier research has concluded that European citizens do not update their Left–Right policy preferences or their party attachments in response to the content of parties’ election manifestos – i.e. partisan sorting is not observed in the mass public in response to shifts in the Left–Right tone of these manifestos. Here we extend this research to analyse whether we observe partisan sorting patterns that correspond with political experts’ perceptions of parties’ Left–Right policy shifts. Given that these experts plausibly consider all pertinent information when estimating parties’ Left–Right orientations – including party elites’ speeches, elite interviews, coalition behaviour, and legislative voting patterns – such a finding would imply that citizens do weigh the wider informational environment when updating their Left–Right orientations and their party support, even if they do not attach great weight to the parties’ policy manifestos. Our analyses provide support for this hypothesis with respect to niche parties, i.e. green, communist, and radical right parties, but not for mainstream parties.     

Parties are always right: the effects of party cues and policy information on attitudes towards EU issues

Abstract

This article analyses the influence that political parties exert upon citizens’ opinions about European Union issues. By measuring at the same time the content and source effects on political attitudes, the article considers the possibility that voters pay less attention to the arguments used in a political message than to its source. Results from an online survey experiment in Spain show that partisan voters use a heuristic model of processing when taking positions on an unfamiliar EU issue, even though the prevalence of the source effect is moderated by the respondent’s political sophistication and party attachment. The results also indicate that some respondents tend to pay less attention to a message’s content when the message comes from their preferred party. Such findings raise concerns about the possibility for EU issue voting to guarantee the accountability of political elites and party–voter linkages.     

The relationship between bias and swing ratio in the Electoral College and the outcome of presidential elections

In this paper, I assess how the outcomes of presidential elections are affected by the presence (or lack) of partisan bias in the Electoral College. There have been three instances (1876, 1888 and 2000) since the end of the Civil War where the party that lost the popular vote won the Electoral College. These instances raise the question of whether partisan bias consistently influences presidential election outcomes? I answer this question by first measuring partisan bias and then using these estimates to assess how partisan bias affects a party's odds of winning a presidential election. I find that the presence of partisan bias provides a sizable, but not insurmountable, obstacle for the disadvantaged party.     

Affect,Social Pressure and Prosocial Motivation: Field Experimental Evidence of the Mobilizing Effects of Pride,Shame and Publicizing Voting Behavior

Citizens generally try to cooperate with social norms, especially when norm compliance is monitored and publicly disclosed. A recent field experimental study demonstrates that civic appeals that tap into social pressure motivate electoral participation appreciably (Gerber et al., Am Polit Sci Rev 102:33–48, 2008). Building on this work, I use field experimental techniques to examine further the socio-psychological mechanisms that underpin this effect. I report the results of three field experiments conducted in the November 2007 elections designed to test whether voters are more effectively mobilized by appeals that engender feelings of pride (for reinforcing or perpetuating social and cultural values or norms) or shame (for violating social and cultural values or norms). Voters in Monticello, Iowa and Holland, Michigan were randomly assigned to receive a mailing that indicated the names of all verified voters in the November 2007 election would be published in the local newspaper (pride treatment). In Ely, Iowa voters were randomly assigned to receive a mailing that indicated the names of all verified nonvoters would be published in the local newspaper (shame treatment). The experimental findings suggest shame may be more effective than pride on average, but this may depend on who the recipients are. Pride motivates compliance with voting norms only amongst high-propensity voters, while shame mobilizes both high- and low-propensity voters.     

Election Timing,Electorate Composition,and Policy Outcomes: Evidence from School Districts

There is considerable debate about how election timing shapes who votes, election outcomes, and, ultimately, public policy. We examine these matters by combining information on more than 10,000 school tax referenda with detailed micro‐targeting data on voters participating in each election. The analysis confirms that timing influences voter composition in terms of partisanship, ideology, and the numerical strength of powerful interest groups. But, in contrast to prominent theories of election timing, these effects are modest in terms of their likely impact on election outcomes. Instead, timing has the most significant impact on voter age, with the elderly being the most overrepresented group in low‐turnout special elections. The electoral (and policy) implications of this effect vary between states, and we offer one explanation for this variation.     

Knowing your sources: Partisan media and voters’ perceptions of the economy

This paper explains how media systems influence the extent to which partisanship colors voters’ perceptions of the economy (i.e., the strength of the partisan screen). It builds upon research on individual-level biases in economic perceptions, seeking to extend existing work by considering how the availability of partisan media for a given party affect such biases. The implication of this is that the greater the availability of media sources favorable to a party, the stronger the partisan screen for its partisans. This follows from several mechanisms including selective acceptance of messages, selective exposure to partisan sources, and incidental exposure to partisan sources. Each of these suggests that differences in the availability of partisan media across parties leads to corresponding differences in the extent of partisan bias for partisans of these parties. I test this Hypothesis in 14 European countries over four time-periods using data built from expert surveys on media characteristics.     

All in the Family: Partisan Disagreement and Electoral Mobilization in Intimate Networks—A Spillover Experiment

We advance the debate about the impact of political disagreement in social networks on electoral participation by addressing issues of causal inference common in network studies, focusing on voters' most important context of interpersonal influence: the household. We leverage a randomly assigned spillover experiment conducted in the United Kingdom, combined with a detailed database of pretreatment party preferences and public turnout records, to identify social influence within heterogeneous and homogeneous partisan households. Our results show that intrahousehold mobilization effects are larger as a result of campaign contact in heterogeneous than in homogeneous partisan households, and larger still when the partisan intensity of the message is exogenously increased, suggesting discussion rather than behavioral contagion as a mechanism. Our results qualify findings from influential observational studies and suggest that within intimate social networks, negative correlations between political heterogeneity and electoral participation are unlikely to result from political disagreement.     

Quality Is Job One: Professional and Volunteer Voter Mobilization Calls

Campaigns rely upon both paid and volunteer phone calls to mobilize voters. Past field experiments show calls from volunteers to increase turnout and paid calls to be wholly ineffective. This article argues that the quality of phone calls rather than the presence or absence of a payroll explains this regularity. Three aspects of quality are considered: monitoring pace and interactivity, timing, and message. A fully randomized field experiment with over 100,000 subjects comparing professional and volunteer phone banks simultaneously was conducted during the 2002 congressional elections to test this hypothesis. The experiment discovers precisely the opposite relationship of prior research: effective professional phone banks and inefficient volunteer phone calls. The experiment also finds substantial temporal decay. The specific messages appear less important than tone or timing. The implications for the role of campaign consultants, replacing social capital, voter psychology, and the capacities of civic organizations are discussed.     

Campaign Persuasion and Nascent Partisanship in Mexico's New Democracy

Despite ample evidence of preelection volatility in vote intentions in new democracies, scholars of comparative politics remain skeptical that campaigns affect election outcomes. Research on the United States provides a theoretical rationale for campaign effects, but shows little of it in practice in presidential elections because candidates’ media investments are about equal and voters’ accumulated political knowledge and partisan attachments make them resistant to persuasive messages. I vary these parameters by examining a new democracy where voters’ weaker partisan attachments and lower levels of political information magnify the effects of candidates’ asymmetric media investments to create large persuasion effects. The findings have implications for the generalizability of campaign effects theory to new democracies, the development of mass partisanship, candidate advertising strategies, and the specific outcome of Mexico's hotly contested 2006 presidential election. Data come primarily from the Mexico 2006 Panel Study.     

Timing the habit: Voter registration and turnout

Does registration timing impact whether an individual becomes a habitual voter? We argue that those registering in near proximity to a presidential election are more likely to vote in the upcoming election compared to those who register at other times during an election cycle because they seek an immediate return on their investment, but they are less likely to become habituated to vote in subsequent mid-term and primary elections. We suggest that this is because last-minute registrants, many of whom were registered through voter registration drives, were not focused on long-term electoral payoffs. Leveraging Florida's statewide voter files, we use logistic regression and propensity score weighting with county fixed-effects to evaluate if the timing of voter registration has significant short- and long-term turnout effects in high- and low-salience elections, controlling for party registration and an array of demographic factors. We find that the timing of registration does affect turnout, as last-minute registrants are not equally likely to vote in ensuing elections.     

Party strategies,world demand,and unemployment in Britain and the United States, 1947–1983

This paper replicates and extends earlier work on the politics of macroeconomic policy by considering political effects on unemployment in Britain and the United States from 1947 to 1983. Unemployment falls under left-wing governments and rises under right-wing governments. However, these partisan effects on unemployment in an open economy like Britain's can only be satisfactorily estimated relative to the level of world economic activity. The United States has major effects on world economic activity but is also subject to feedback from the economies of other countries. Politicians' strategic incentives and economic regime constraints determine whether partisan effects on unemployment will be sustained, transitory, or absent. In Britain, only a model in which partisan impacts are transitory satisfactorily estimates the effects of changes of party control. In the United States, only the transitory-impact model is able to estimate partisan effects in recent administrations.