Strategic Candidate Entry and Congressional Elections in the Era of Fox News

Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak-party systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic-minded politicians who carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high-quality potential candidates. Using congressional district-level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered Republican potential candidates' perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their entry patterns.     

Blame,Responsibility, and the Tea Party in the 2010 Midterm Elections

There is a general consensus both in the news media and scholarly research that 2010 was a highly nationalized election year. Reports have indicated that anti-Obama sentiment, the Democrats’ legislative agenda, the economy, and the Tea Party were all factors contributing to Democratic losses in the congressional elections. In this paper, we use data from 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to examine the individual-level dynamics that contributed to the heightened nationalization of the 2010 congressional elections. Our analysis shows that Tea Party support and the attribution of blame and responsibility by voters are essential to understanding the 2010 election outcome, beyond what we would expect from a simple referendum model of midterm elections. Not surprisingly, Tea Party supporters blamed Democrats for the state of national affairs, disapproved of the Democrats’ policy agenda, and overwhelmingly supported Republican candidates in the congressional elections. However, our analysis shows that not all voters who supported Republican candidates were driven by high levels of opposition to President Obama and the Democrats. Another key group of voters blamed both Democrats and Republicans for the nation’s problems but ultimately held Democrats responsible in the voting booth by supporting Republican congressional candidates.     

Hunting where the ducks are: activating support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary

ABSTRACT

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Republican primary defied the predictions of many politicians, pundits, and political scientists. Yet, while Trump’s nomination was hard to predict, it is not difficult to explain. We show that Trump’s campaign message succeeded by activating longstanding, but often unappreciated, sentiments among Republican voters about immigration and economic entitlements. In particular, his support was concentrated among Republican voters with hawkish views on immigration and relatively liberal views on economic policy. Moreover, these views preceded support for Trump, rather than the other way around. Drawing on an original panel survey, we show that attitudes about immigration and economic entitlements measured in 2011 strongly predicted support for Trump in 2016. Although Trump’s coalition struck many observers as odd, it was predicated on a set of attitudes that is not unusual among Republican voters. He simply hunted where the ducks are.     

Strategic political commentary

I model the media’s role in transmitting information to voters in a strategic framework. Media outlets in which commentators speak primarily to voters of like type face strong incentives to reveal private information about political choices truthfully, while “mainstream” outlets observed by all types of voters face mixed incentives. Also, the number of preference-matched news outlets determines the informativeness of the mainstream media; a general increase in the number of news outlets does not necessarily improve the quality of information conveyed by the media. The model also rationalizes why commentators of a single political preference predominate in the mainstream media.     

Across time and space: Explaining variation in news coverage of the European Union

News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This study investigates explanations for cross‐national and over‐time variation in news media coverage of EU affairs drawing on large‐scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in the EU‐15 (1999), EU‐25 (2004) and EU‐27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament (EP) elections. The analyses focus in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to media characteristics and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during EP election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU in combination with overall more negative positions towards the EU, the more visible the news. Also, increases in EU news visibility from one election to the next and the Europeanness of the news are determined by a country's elite positions. The findings are discussed in light of the EU's alleged communication deficit.     

The Role of Media Distrust in Partisan Voting

As an institution, the American news media have become highly unpopular in recent decades. Yet, we do not thoroughly understand the consequences of this unpopularity for mass political behavior. While several existing studies find that media trust moderates media effects, they do not examine the consequences of this for voting. This paper explores those consequences by analyzing voting behavior in the 2004 presidential election. It finds, consistent with most theories of persuasion and with studies of media effects in other contexts, that media distrust leads voters to discount campaign news and increasingly rely on their partisan predispositions as cues. This suggests that increasing aggregate levels of media distrust are an important source of greater partisan voting.     

Race,Class, and Values in Post-New Deal Presidential Politics: Inverted Class Loyalties as a Trend in Presidential Elections, 2000–2012

This article analyzes the role of race, class, and values as a determinant of voting behavior in recent presidential elections. Over the past decade the What's the Matter with Kansas? thesis has been cited to argue that the culture wars over social issues (civil rights, homosexual rights, feminism, gun control) have inverted the class determinant of partisan choice to the point where lower-income white voters favor the Republican Party while professionals have shifted toward the Democratic Party. The article concludes that there is significant evidence that the class loyalties as determinants of partisan identity established by the New Deal have been superseded by values-driven imperatives, which are themselves trumped by racial identities. As a result, traditionally Democratic pre-materialist white blue-collar constituencies have moved toward the Republican Party, while the opposite has occurred in traditionally Republican post-materialist suburban constituencies.     

Media proliferation and partisan selective exposure

The number of Internet news media outlets has skyrocketed in recent years. We analyze the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes assuming voters may choose news that is too partisan, from an informational perspective, i.e., engage in partisan selective exposure. We find that if voters who prefer highly partisan news—either because they are truly ideologically extreme, or due to a tendency towards excessive selective exposure—are politically “important,” then proliferation is socially beneficial, as it makes these voters more likely to obtain informative news. Otherwise, proliferation still protects against very poor electoral outcomes that can occur when the number of outlets is small and the only media options are highly partisan. Our model’s overall implication is thus that, surprisingly, proliferation is socially beneficial regardless of the degree of selective exposure.     

A comparative analysis of Channels TV and CNN's coverage of World News

This study did an analysis of the Western and Third world coverage of World News using the broadcast stations (CNN and Channels TV) as case study. In other words, the study sought to examine if the Western and Third World nations are still guilty of imbalance, bias and distortion in their treatment of news. The findings showed that both the North and South nations are guilty of bias and imbalance in their coverage of World News and that each nation seeks to promote their interest rather than a true world interest or the interest of their counterpart nations. The study further revealed that the Third World media still depend heavily on Western media sources for its news albeit their standpoint on the News Flow debate. About 50% of the entire World News stories on Channels TV were sourced ‘outside’, while about 40% were unidentified. Only 10% were from the in‐house personnel. It was also observed that about 55 and 67% of World News coverage by Channels TV and CNN, respectively, were focused on ‘bad news’; an age‐long controversy that has bedeviled news coverage globally. In view of the foregoing, it has been recommended that there is need for the acceptance of ‘imbalance’ as a major feature of all media systems as well as a re‐evaluation of the standards and values of news evaluation. The rapid industrialization of Third World economies will also go a long way to stop the one‐way traffic in international communication which is what encourages media dependence. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”: Media and Conservative Networks

The American Right's speedy political recovery after the historic 2008 election was driven in part by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck. Yet conservative media are just one key component in the broad political networks built over the past few decades. Conservative talk radio, print publications, television networks, and internet sites have numerous connections, both direct and indirect, with the think tanks, advocacy organizations, academic research centers, and foundations that develop and promote the Right's policy agenda. Progressives have acknowledged this “vast right-wing conspiracy” for years, but often demonstrate little understanding of how it actually works. In this article I remind readers of the expansive scope and shape of conservative networks. Using the rise of Tea Party populism, I demonstrate how media organizations work within these networks to revive and promote ideas and action on the Right.     

Economic influences on presidential popularity among key political and socioeconomic groups: A review of the evidence and some new findings

This paper analyzes presidential popularity among important political and socioeconomic groups in the United States from 1965 to 1980, making use of the Gallup Poll indicators of support for the incumbent president among the main socioeconomic, regional, generational, sexual, and racial groups, and among Democratic, Republican, and independent voters. The analysis allows fully for both economic and noneconomic influences on incumbent popularity and includes in an integrated rational model underlying partisan orientations. The conclusions suggest the strong importance of partisanship, with the public's political response to the economy depending largely on the political affiliation of the incumbent president. Beyond this, we find economic predictors generally are more important than any of the systematic political or cyclical predictors tested here, with unemployment the single most important influence on presidential popularity. For all presidents, macroeconomic conditions have greater political significance than do the government's redistributive policies designed to influence economic well-being. And with minor exceptions, the economy's political importance is equally strong for all economic classes in American society.     

Politics,entertainment and business: a multisided model of media

We offer a model of media as a multisided platform, providing entertainment and news to viewers, commercial opportunities to advertisers, and political influence to politicians, thanks to the presence of influenceable voters among the media audience. We characterize a political economic equilibrium, determining simultaneously media choices and politicians’ electoral positions. We show that as the value of political influence increases, the media transitions from catering to commercial advertisers to selling political influence, resulting in policy choices that hurt influenceable voters.     

Are non‐voters cynics anyway?

It has been argued that recent low turnouts for elections in Britain have been fostered by increased cynicism among voters, a cynicism that has been fostered by the increasingly critical tone in which politics are reported by the media. While survey data confirm that voters have become more cynical about politics, they provide little evidence that this trend was particularly strong between 1997 and 2001 among (regular) readers of the (tabloid) press or among regular watchers of television news. Nor do such data suggest that the rise in cynicism had much impact on the level of turnout for the 2001 general election. The biggest challenge facing coverage of politics in the media in general, and newspapers in particular, is not the impact that the tone of its coverage may be having on voters' attitudes towards how they are governed, but rather the increasing reluctance of voters with little interest in politics to read a newspaper at all. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

Is all PR good PR? How the content of media exposure affects candidate popularity

Existing evidence shows that media exposure is associated with increased political popularity, but we know less about how the electoral effects of media coverage may vary with the content of the coverage. By collecting hundreds of thousands of media articles, which we then sort by content using automatic topic modelling, we build a unique dataset of political candidates, their popularity, and the quantity and type of media exposure that candidates receive. Analysing this dataset, we find that media attention is, indeed, an electoral asset. Further, and crucially, we find that voters reward politicians for politically relevant exposure, while non-political exposure is ignored, or even penalised. Consequently, this is good news for how democracies work; voters hold politicians accountable based on relevant information. The findings are of relevance to students of media, political behaviour, parties and political competition, as well as normative democratic theory.     

Donald Trump's Hijacking of the Republican Party in Historical Perspective

Four aspects of Donald Trump's hijack of the Republican party are examined. First, how he used unconventional techniques, usually associated with some ‘reality’ television programmes, to become the leading candidate in the pre‐primary debates. He could thereby develop ‘momentum’ before the primaries began despite his limited support among Republican activists. Second, how his insurgency differed from the party's takeover in 1964 by supporters of Barry Goldwater. Third, how the Republicans have replaced the Democrats since the early 1980s as the party with a less cohesive potential coalition among voters, with the result that internal party relations became more conflictual throughout the period. Finally, that internal conflict has been intensified by two factors in those decades: the prevalence of divided government, which has made it virtually impossible to impose a truly conservative agenda on federal government policy, and the impact of forty years of stagnating real incomes for many middle‐income Americans.     

Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy?

This article assesses the normative and positive claims regarding the consequences of biased media using a political agency framework that includes a strategic voter, polarized politicians, and news providers. My model predicts that voters are always better informed with unbiased than with biased outlets even when the latter have opposite ideological preferences. However, biased media may improve voter welfare. Contrary to several scholars' fears, partisan news providers are not always bad for democracy. My theoretical findings also have important implications for empirical analyses of the electoral consequences of changes in the media environment. The impact of left‐wing and right‐wing biased outlets depends on the partisan identity of officeholders. Empirical findings may, thus, not be comparable across studies or even over time within a study. Existing empirical works are unlikely to measure the consequences of biased media, as researchers never observe and can rarely approximate the adequate counterfactual: elections with unbiased news outlets.     

Partisan change in the Mountain West

During the 1980s partisanship in the Mountain West shifted dramatically toward the Republican Party. This change was the result of issue-based conversion rather than group mobilization. Specifically, we trace this surge to Reagan's transformation of the issues connected with the Republican Party. Previous discussions of issue-based conversion have assumed that this force influences all voters equally. One of the issues behind the Mountain West's changed partisanship follows this pattern: Individualism (or limiting government influence on the individual) was behind both the Mountain West surge (and decline) in Republicanism and the nationwide growth in that party. But the second issue did not follow this pattern: Abortion influenced the Mountain West selectively. We conclude that partisan change can be the result of uniform influence of issue change, but that it can also be the result of issue changes that influence different groups of voters differentially.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.     

Does Sex Encourage Commitment? The Impact of Candidate Choices on the Time-to-Decision

The sex of a congressional candidate can influence voting choices, but does candidate sex also influence the timing of those choices? This paper examines that question in light of other information that voters weigh in making their decisions. Using a national survey from the 2006 election, and a unique dataset of political informants, we find that the sex of the candidate conveys ideological information that permits voters to make swifter judgments. Additionally, it reduces the probability of a delayed decision by supplying information helpful to the choice between candidates—even in the absence of ideology. In fact, the impact of candidate sex rivals other variables that are traditionally used to explain the time-to-decision. Consistent with the literature on sex stereotypes, we find a stronger influence for Democratic than Republican female candidates.