Issue Frame Ownership: The Partisan Roots of Campaign Rhetoric

Campaigns can shape vote choice decisions by effectively framing issues for voters. I examine how campaigns do this by studying the content of issues appeals in television advertisements from U.S. House and Senate candidates. The use of issue frames is partisan. The two parties develop their own distinct rhetorical strategies on particular issues, showing that each party owns particular issue frames. In addition, campaign messages are sensitive to the partisanship of voters. Campaigns are more likely to use conservative frames in Republican-leaning districts and liberal frames in Democratic-leaning districts. Models of campaign strategy should incorporate not just what issues are discussed, but also the rhetorical choices campaigns make to address these issues.     

South African election posters: Reflecting the maturing of a democracy?

Abstract

The South African democracy has survived three national and provincial elections and three local elections, since 1994. In comparison to other young democracies in Africa, South Africa has experienced a relatively stable transition to democracy. However, the ruling ANC has not been under pressure from opposition parties. Although this has helped pave the way, a dominant governing party does not necessarily encourage the growth of a mature, democratic political culture. The assumption of this article is that political parties in developing societies have a normative obligation to do more than canvas votes during election campaigns. Political parties should also be instrumental in fostering a democratic political culture by communicating democratic values, encouraging participation in the democracy and enabling voters to make an informed electoral choice. Although political posters contribute mainly to image building, the reinforcement of party support, and the visibility of the party, posters are the agenda setters or headlines of a party's campaign – it is therefore argued that political parties in developing societies also need to design political posters responsively, in order to sustain the democracy. In general it seems that the poster campaigns of parties have matured since 1999, in the sense that there was less emphasis on democratisation issues in the past, and the campaigns conformed more to the norm of Western political campaigning.     

Candidate-centric systems and the politicization of ethnicity: evidence from Indonesia

When and why do electoral candidates politicize ethnicity? From the literature, we might expect this behaviour to occur during democratic transitions or under proportional rules. However, empirical support for these arguments is mixed. This article presents a new approach, arguing that candidate-centric rules offer candidates incentives to politicize ethnicity. The argument is tested in Indonesia with empirical evidence drawn from coding newspaper reports on campaign events, endorsements and group appeals. Indonesia used party-centric rules from 1997 to 2004, and even though the country democratized during this period, the politicization of ethnicity actually declined. I show how party-centric rules, coupled with a national economic crisis, encouraged candidates to campaign on broad national platforms of reform and development, thereby appealing to the poor rather than to ethnic groups. Between 2004 and 2009, the system became more candidate-centric and the politicization of ethnicity increased. I argue that changes in the system freed candidates from national party platforms and motivated them to campaign on their local connections with ethnic groups. This study is particularly pertinent amidst the push for direct candidate-centric elections in the developing world and the lack of literature on how such rules could affect ethnic politics.     

The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

Tim Cook: A Remembrance

Sparse literature exists on the topic of intimacy appeals in political advertising, so in this study Horton and Wohl's para-social theory was applied to explain the “relationship” in Israel between television performers (politicians) and spectators (voters) through the intimacy concept. Altogether, 442 political ads from two Israeli election campaigns (1996 and 1999) were analyzed to test three hypotheses on the use of intimacy appeals across campaigns and political parties. The intimacy appeal measure consisted of five intimacy techniques and was thus characterized as a macro-level variable. These techniques appear in the codebook as five questions that examine whether the spots present words of intimacy, intimate situations, families of politicians, nonverbal expressions, and children. The results indicate that intimacy appeals in political spots are quite popular. Religious and left-leaning parties tended to use intimacy appeals significantly more than nonreligious and right-leaning parties. We conclude that politicians indeed use the same intimacy strategies and techniques as other television performers do; therefore, para-social theory accords with the concept of intimacy in political advertising as much as in other communication settings.     

Electoral competition and democratic decline in Nicaragua: uncovering an electorally viable platform for the right

Between the 1980s and 2006 Nicaragua was a competitive democracy where parties of the left and right won national presidential elections and relinquished power when their terms ended. More recently the quality of Nicaragua’s democracy has deteriorated. This change is due partly to autocratic behaviour by the elected leftist president, Daniel Ortega. But democratic decline is also the result of factional divisions and vague, outmoded policy commitments on the right that have crippled its electoral competitiveness, enabling Ortega’s behaviour. Utilizing an experimental research design, this article identifies two modernized policy platforms that could significantly broaden rightist electoral support in presidential campaigns, aiding democratic resurgence in Nicaragua. At a point when opposition parties are struggling to retain strength and coherence in many other democracies, the study presents a research strategy that could help clarify the ways such parties might reinvigorate their electoral competitiveness.     

Robbing Peter to pay Paul: changing clientelist patterns in East Timor’s 2017 parliamentary elections

This article examines the adverse impact of clientelist relations between political parties and campaign donors on parties’ relations with voters. Clientelism is generally conceptualized as a vertical, pyramid structure, whereby resources are distributed from politicians to voters at the base through brokers or programmatic politics. As Gherghina and Volintiru¹1 Gherghina and Volintiru, A New Model of Clientelism.View all notescontend, what is often overlooked is that in tandem with this vertical relationship with voters there is a complementary horizontal relationship with party donors. Parties with a weak organizational base focus on relations with party donors, such as private contractors, at the expense of their relationship with voters. Drawing on fieldwork conducted during East Timor’s 2017 parliamentary elections, I engage with Gherghina and Volintiru’s framework to argue that a bi-dimensional approach is integral to both understanding electoral outcomes and economic trajectories in developing country contexts. In East Timor, despite a decade of rampant patronage politics, the incumbent CNRT party’s prioritization of their relationship with party donors cost them the election. In turn, this focus on party donors has distorted policy and public spending priorities, with severe implications for future development.     

Partisan Bias in Message Selection: Media Gatekeeping of Party Press Releases

Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general.     

Justifying forceful resistance to ethnic separatism: The case of Russia versus Chechnya, 1994–96

This article examines how states try to mobilize mass and elite support for wars against ethnic separatists, and what factors affect their success in this effort, using the 1994–96 Russian‐Chechen conflict as a case study. It argues that governments fighting ethnic separatists usually appeal to three sets of normative principles to gamer support for this effort: democracy and rights, law and order, and territorial integrity and unity. After showing how the Yeltsin government relied on these principles in its campaign to justify the war, the article examines and explains the extent to which these appeals were successful.     

Issue Frames and the Political Outcomes of Transnational Campaigns: A Comparison of the Jubilee 2000 Movement and the Currency Transaction Tax Campaign

Since the end of the Cold War, a large number of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) have launched campaigns focusing on a number of different global issues. Some of these campaigns have been quite successful in influencing global public policy, while others have not. What accounts for differences in TANs' ability to shape the global policy process? How can we explain the variation in TAN campaign outcomes? To answer these questions, I draw on the concept of framing, which has been used to explain social movement mobilisation and outcomes, and apply it to two TAN campaigns that have had different outcomes: Jubilee 2000 and the Currency Transaction Tax campaign. I argue that effective framing strategies, i.e. the use of issue frames that resonate with international norms and values and provide compelling analyses and policy proposals, is one explanation for the variation in the outcomes of these two TAN campaigns.     

Religious parties and democracy: A comparative assessment of Israel and Turkey

Discussions of the role of religious parties in democracies can be highly misleading when they take the parties' ideologies at face value and assign them to the binary categories of moderate vs radical. Only by a careful review of how religious parties use religious and secular symbols in defining their political stances can we evaluate their roles vis-à-vis liberal democracy. The competing political ideologies of the Mafdal and Shas Parties in Israel and the National Action Party, the Prosperity Party and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey are foci of this analysis. Two controversial concepts, ‘redemption’ in Israel and ‘secularism’ in Turkey, are used to question how these parties appropriate religious symbols in their policies towards secular public and institutions. The arguments draw on a set of interviews with the religious party leaderships and a content analysis of party ideologues' views. The findings suggest that parties that adopt the strategy of sacralization (that is, assigning religious meanings to secular ideas thereby treating them as sacred) appear more moderate yet they are more likely to support authoritarian policies. However, the so-called radical religious parties tend to be more inclusive and are more likely to secularize their respective religious tradition internally by redefining secular terms. Despite their novel political agendas both groups fail to exhibit principled commitment to liberal values and fail to provide inclusive and coherent alternatives to their secularist counterparts.     

An Experimental Test of Selectorate Theory

This article uses a laboratory experiment to test one of the main predictions of selectorate theory, that is, that democratic leaders invest more resources in public goods than autocratic leaders. The results of the experiment confirm this prediction and further show citizens are better off on average under democratic institutions than autocratic institutions. Meanwhile, autocratic leaders receive higher payoffs than democratic leaders. Additionally, this article attempts to bring domestic politics into international relations experimentation with a focus on how communication may allow democracies to organize more efficiently for war than autocracies. A game theoretical model shows democracies have the potential to organize optimally and use their citizens’ skills to their full advantage while autocracies do not. The results of the experiment reveal some evidence that democracies organize more efficiently than autocracies, but that this increased efficiency did not produce a higher percentage of conflict wins.     

The Dynamics of the Demobilization of the Protest Campaign in Assam

This study highlights the role that critical events play in the demobilization of protest campaigns. Social movement scholars suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of polarization within the campaign or the cooptation of the campaign leaders. I offer critical events as an alternative causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns in ethnically divided societies are particularly combustible, as they have the potential to trigger unintended or unorchestrated communal violence. When such violence occurs, elite strategies change, mass support declines, and the campaign demobilizes. An empirical investigation of the dynamics of the demobilization phase of the anti-foreigner protest campaign in Assam, India, between 1979 and 1985 confirms this argument. A single group analysis is conducted to compare the dynamics of the campaign before and after the communal violence by using time series event data collected from The Indian Express, a national newspaper. The study has wider implications for the literature on collective action, as it illuminates the dynamic and complex nature of protest campaigns.     

Non-extremist Outbidding: Muslim Leadership in Majoritarian India

How do parties representing minorities survive and expand at a time of majoritarian nationalism? Influential accounts suggest that the rise of majoritarianism should give rise to corresponding extremist outbidding in minority parties. Through a detailed case study of an Indian Muslim party in an era of Hindu majoritarianism, this article elaborates a new notion of non-extremist outbidding. It argues that outbidding need not imply appeals that are extremist in the sense that they are exclusionary, or religious, or intransigent. The agency of leaders, relatively neglected, plays a key role in determining the behavior of ethnic parties.     

Terrorism and public opinion: A five country comparison

This article examines public attitudes towards terrorism in five countries: Uruguay, Spain, Italy, Germany and Northern Ireland. It analyzes public concern over terrorism, images of the terrorists, support for the terrorists' goals, and public approval of anti‐terrorist measures. There are significant differences between nationalist and revolutionary terrorism. Nationalist terrorists have a high degree of support from an ethnic constituency, while revolutionary terrorists attract a much smaller degree of support primarily from the educated young. It is concluded that public opinion towards terrorism is a product of complex historical situations, and that public attitudes are unaffected by the terrorist campaign itself.     

Priming Issues,Party Visibility,and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Voter volatility has become a hallmark of Western democracies in the past three decades. At the same time short-term factors—such as the media’s coverage of issues, parties, and candidates during an election campaign—have become more important for voters’ decisions. While previous research did look at how campaign news in general affects electoral volatility in general, it has omitted to explicitly test the mechanisms underlying these effects. Building on theories of agenda setting, (affective) priming, and issue ownership, the current study aims to explain why certain news aspects lead voters to switch their vote choice. We theorize it is the visibility of a party, the evaluation of a party, and the attention for issues owned by a party that primes voters to switch to a certain party. We use national panel survey data (N = 765) and link this to an extensive content analysis of campaign news on television and in newspapers in the run up to the 2012 Dutch national elections. The results show that issue news leads to vote change in the direction of the party that owns the issue. Even stronger is the effect of party visibility on vote switching. Our results, however, find the strongest support for the effect of party evaluations on vote change: More favorable news about a party increases switching to that party.     

Briefly Noted

The argument is commonly made that television has changed the character of parliamentary elections. Its ever more central role in election campaigns outside the United States is held to have “presidentialized” parliamentary elections because it is a medium that projects personalities more effectively than ideas or policies. A comparison of the electoral roles of the Australian prime minister and the U.S. president indicates that both leaders are held personally accountable for government performance. However, such “presidentialism” appears to have little to do with television in Australia or in the United States. Television‐dependent citizens in both countries are less susceptible to the campaign appeals of chief executives than the rest of the voting public. Both leaders, but especially the president, do have an electoral impact. Counter to expectations, however, this impact makes itself felt in both cases among those voters who are not dependent on television for their political information and cues. Party identification seems to insulate the television‐dependent more successfully against leader effects.     

Capitalizing on Contention: Issue Agendas in U.S. Senate Campaigns

This abstract addresses the divergent views that political scientists and members of Congress have about the role of issues in congressional campaigns. The scholarly perspective is based on the assumption that issues and policy are relatively unimportant in the relationship between members and their constituents. In contrast, the political parties in Congress devote a substantial amount of time and attention to developing an effective issue agenda for the campaign season. The research presented in this article is a systematic study of U.S. Senate candidates' campaign messages that assesses the impact of the parties' agenda setting efforts during the election year session. The parties' efforts are compared with mass media, major legislative accomplishments, and party issue ownership as alternative sources of agenda setting in campaigns. The results of this study indicate that Senate candidates do emphasize certain issues in their campaigns and that the contentious election year issues associated with party strategy along with major legislative accomplishments are the issues that the candidates are likely to discuss.     

Air Campaign Duration and the Interaction of Air and Ground Forces

This article explores the role that ground troops play in aerial campaigns. Specifically, it intends to explain how ground troops affect the duration of aerial bombing campaigns. It distinguishes between the effect of ground troops on the duration of aerial campaigns that are selective and on those that are more general and less discriminate (using newly coded data on aerial strategies). The effect of ground troops may vary depending on how air power is being used. Ground troops may increase the duration of aerial campaigns in cases in which selective strategies are used during the aerial bombing campaign. In these cases, states lose the possibility of quick, “clean” victories once ground troops are introduced. In the cases of the less-discriminate bombing campaigns, the effect of ground troops is the opposite: They shorten the duration of the bombing campaign, possibly through the increased effectiveness of a combined arms approach.     

How the Media Shape Perceptions of Right-Wing Populist Leaders

It is often argued that right-wing populist party leaders are dependent on the media for their public image, which in turn is key for their electoral success. This study tests this assumption by comparing the effects of the media coverage of 2 Dutch right-wing populist leaders with the effects of the coverage of leaders of established parties, in a real-life setting, by tracking campaign developments in the Dutch 2006 national election campaign. We combine panel survey data (n?=?401) with repeated measurements of the party leaders' public images with a systematic content analysis of 17 media outlets (with a total of 1,001 stories), on the basis of the media consumption of individual respondents. Our results show significant effects of the content of media coverage on the public image of political leaders. However, only in 1 case (out of 10) is there a significant difference between right-wing populist party leaders and leaders of other parties in the strength of media effects. It thus seems that leaders of right-wing populist parties are just as dependent upon the media as leaders of other parties. The findings are discussed in the light of extant research on right-wing populist parties and media populism.