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.     

Strange bedfellows: Coalition makeup and perceptions of democratic performance among electoral winners

We argue that the partisan makeup of governing coalitions affects perceptions of democratic performance among those who voted for a government party. We introduce ambivalence toward the governing parties as the mechanism that drives this relationship, and we argue that such ambivalence, which occurs when favorability ratings of the parties vary, will be more common where the parties are more ideologically diverse. After advancing our theory, we test our expectations with post-election survey data from several countries. Evidence demonstrates that coalition ambivalence is greater where governing parties are ideologically divergent, and, even when controlling for this ideological divergence, ambivalence leads to more negative perceptions of democratic performance, bringing the attitudes of electoral winners closer to those of individuals who did not vote for a party in government.     

Event-Driven Political Communication and the Preadult Socialization of Partisanship

This study investigates political communication as a mediator of the socializing effects of major political events. We earlier found that presidential campaigns are occasions for increased crystallization of partisan attitudes among adolescents (Sears and Valentino, 1997). But what drives the socialization process during the campaign? Either the campaign saturates the media environment with political information, socializing all adolescents roughly equally, or greater individual exposure to political information is necessary for significant socialization gains during the campaign. The analyses utilize a three-wave panel study of preadults and their parents during and after the 1980 presidential campaign. Here we find that adolescents exposed to higher levels of political communication experience the largest socialization gains, that the socializing effects of political communication are limited to the campaign season, and that communication boosts socialization only in attitude domains most relevant to the campaign. We conclude that both a high salience event at the aggregate level and high individual levels of communication about the event are necessary to maximize socialization gains.

     

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.     

Partisanship in a Social Setting

No factor appears more powerful in explaining how individuals evaluate political information and form political preferences than partisanship. Yet, virtually all work on the effects of partisanship on preference formation neglects the crucial role of social settings. In this study, I examine how social settings can fundamentally change the influence of partisanship on preferences. I demonstrate that, in fact, social settings exert an independent influence over preference formation—one that is even larger than the influence of partisan ambivalence. The central implication of these findings is that, going forward, we cannot fully explore how citizens apply their partisanship in evaluating political information without also accounting for the social settings in which individuals find themselves.     

The electoral connection in Australia: Candidate roles,campaign activity,and the popular vote

Studies of representational roles usually examine elected representatives rather than election candidates and make little attempt to link roles with either behavior or the popular vote that candidates attract. In this paper, we use 1990 Australian data to examine all major party election candidates, and show that candidates identify with three types of representational roles:locals, who focus on articulating local concerns and interests;partisans, who see their role in party political terms; andlegislators, who emphasize the parliamentary role of an elected representative. Incumbents, especially party leaders, focus on the partisan role. Candidates in each of these three types have different views of the qualities that a candidate should possess and emphasize different forms of campaign activity. In turn, these roles have a modest impact on the popular vote that candidates attract, net of other factors. In Australia, incumbents rely on national partisan forces for reelection, while challengers rely much more on their own efforts.     

The 2020 presidential election and beliefs about fraud: Continuity or change?

The 2020 presidential campaign was plagued by charges of voter fraud both before and after the election took place. While past literature finds that electoral losers are most likely to express misgivings about election integrity, little else is known about the characteristics of individuals who exhibit these beliefs or how the beliefs have changed over time. Employing national surveys from 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020, we examine the levels of pre-election expectations of fraud in the event of an electoral loss over time, as well as the individual-level correlates of beliefs in a range of election-related conspiracy theories prominent in 2020. Our analysis reveals that beliefs in election fraud are common and stable across time, and only occasionally relate to partisanship. Moreover, we find that, even accounting for the influence of partisan motivated reasoning, several psychological orientations––conspiracy thinking, anomie, dark triad personality traits, and denialism––play a unique role in promoting perceptions of voter fraud.     

Time-of-voting decision and susceptibility to campaign effects

There is mounting evidence that election campaigns matter. There are also reasons to expect interpersonal heterogeneity in the susceptibility to campaign influence. Time-of-voting decision has been suggested as a key mediating variable for campaign effects. However, there is no persuasive empirical evidence to substantiate the claim that people who decide during campaigns actually respond to campaign events or campaign-specific information.This study incorporates time of decision into dynamic models of campaign effects in order to test whether there is a significant interaction effect between time of decision and campaign persuasion. In sum, the vote intentions of campaign deciders are indeed more volatile because they respond to actual campaign events and coverage, not because they fluctuate haphazardly. People who say they decided before the campaign are, reassuringly, not influenced by campaigns.     

Campaign claims,partisan cues,and media effects in the 2011 British Electoral System Referendum

Campaigning in the British Electoral System Referendum of 2011 provoked much controversy. Accusations of negativity and dissemination of misinformation came from both sides. Using panel data spanning the crucial period of the campaign, this paper examines shifts in perceptions and intentions associated with information and opinion. First, it takes into account ‘baseline’ effects such as initial partisan cues. Then, in the context of criticism of the low quality information content of the campaign, it asks how much changes in the attitudes of respondents affected electoral system opinion, and the extent to which these changes reflected learning and the provision of information or misinformation. The roles of the Electoral Commission, television coverage, and newspapers are also examined.     

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.     

Party Brands and Partisanship: Theory with Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Argentina

Scholars disagree about the nature of party attachments, viewing partisanship as either a social identity or a rational maximization of expected utility. Empirically, much of this debate centers on the degree of partisan stability: findings of partisan fluctuations are taken as evidence against the social‐identity perspective. But drawing such conclusions assumes that the objects of identity—parties—are fixed. If we instead allow party brands to change over time, then partisan instability is consistent with a social‐identity conception of partisanship. To demonstrate this, I develop a branding model of partisanship in which voters learn about party brands by observing party behavior over time and base their psychological attachment to a party on these brands. The model suggests that convergence by rival parties, making their brands less distinguishable, should weaken party attachments. I test this implication using a survey experiment in Argentina and find evidence consistent with the model.     

Activation,Conversion, or Reinforcement? The Impact of Partisan News Exposure on Vote Choice

This study uses multiwave panel data from the 2008 presidential election to investigate the impact of partisan news exposure on changes in vote preferences over time. Overcoming key limitations of prior research, the analysis distinguishes among the potential effects originally delineated by Lazarsfeld and colleagues ( 1948 ): (1) activation—motivating partisans who initially say they are undecided or planning to defect to shift their vote back to their own party's candidate; (2) conversion—motivating partisans to shift their vote to the opposing party's candidate; and (3) reinforcement—strengthening partisans’ preference for their initial vote choice. The results reveal only modest evidence that partisan news reinforces existing vote preferences. Surprisingly, partisan news plays a more robust role motivating changes in vote choice: news slanted toward citizens’ own partisanship increased the odds of activation and decreased the odds of conversion, while news slanted away from citizens’ own partisanship proved a strong counterforce working in the opposite direction.     

Bringing home the votes: Electoral outcomes in state legislative races

This analysis assesses the effects of campaign activity, measured in terms of the campaign expenditures of candidates, on the outcomes of state legislative elections. The research utilizes election results from the 1978 elections for the state houses in California and Iowa. In addition, the investigation specifies the influence of partisan strength and incumbency on election outcomes. Two multiple regression models are estimated, one in which the partisan vote outcome is the dependent variable and one in which the vote of challengers is the dependent variable. Although the results of the inquiry underscore the partisan character of state legislative races, they also show that, akin to congressional contests, a challenger's campaign spending can sometimes have a greater effect on the voting outcome than the incumbent's spending. But these state legislative elections are largely partisan affairs in which bringing home the votes mainly involves support for political parties in the legislative districts and the intensity of campaign efforts represented by campaign expenditures.     

Voter Decision Making in Election 2000: Campaign Effects, Partisan Activation, and the Clinton Legacy

How do citizens respond to campaign events? We explore this question with a unique repeated measures survey design, fielded during the 2000 presidential campaign. We model transitions in support for the major party candidates following the party conventions and presidential debates. In the aggregate, Gore support increases following the conventions (but not the debates), while Bush support increases with the debates (but not the conventions). But there is considerable microlevel variation in the data: responsiveness to campaign events is greatest among Independents, undecided voters, and “mismatched partisans,” but exactly how these groups respond differs for each event. Moreover, attitudes toward then President Clinton mediate the effect of the campaign events on voter preferences. Two primary conclusions follow: (1) rich data sets are required to observe the effects of campaign events; (2) the influence of campaign events on vote choice is conditional on previous preferences, partisan dispositions, and political context.     

Can Partisan Cues Diminish Democratic Accountability?

When evaluating political candidates, citizens can draw on partisan stereotypes and use partisan cues to make inferences about the candidates’ issue positions without undertaking a costly information search. As long as candidates adopt policy positions that are congruent with partisan stereotypes, partisan cues can help citizens make an accurate voting decision with limited information. However, if candidates take counter-stereotypical positions, it is incumbent upon citizens to recognize it and adjust their evaluations accordingly. Using the dual-processing framework, I hypothesize about the conditions under which individuals reduce their reliance on partisan cues and scrutinize counter-stereotypical messages, and test these hypotheses with experimental data collected from a nationally representative sample of adults. The findings show that whether individuals punish a candidate from their party for taking a counter-stereotypical position is contingent on the salience of the issue and the political awareness of the message recipient. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and normative implications of these findings.

Ecologies of Unease: Geographic Context and National Economic Evaluations

Assessment of the nation??s economic performance has been repeatedly linked to voters?? decision-making in U.S. presidential elections. Here we inquire as to where those economic evaluations originate. One possibility in the politicized environment of a major campaign is that they are partisan determinations and do not reflect actual economic circumstances. Another possibility is that these judgments arise from close attention to news media, which is presumably highlighting national economic conditions as a facet of campaign coverage. Still a third explanation is that voters derive their national economic evaluations from living out their lives in particular localities which may or may not be experiencing the conditions that affect the nation as a whole. Drawing upon data from the 2008 presidential election, we find that varying local conditions do shape the economic evaluations of political independents. Moreover, unemployment is not the only salient factor, as fuel prices and foreclosures also figured prominently. Local economic factors, what we call geotropic considerations, shape national economic evaluations especially for those who aren??t making these judgments on simple partisan grounds.     

The Moderating Effect of Debates on Political Attitudes

In theory, candidate debates can influence voters by providing information about candidates' quality and policy positions. However, there is limited evidence about whether and why debates influence voters in new democracies. We use a field experiment on parliamentary debates during Ghana's 2016 elections to show that debates improve voters' evaluations of candidates. Debates have the strongest effect on partisan voters, who become more favorable toward and more likely to vote for opponent-party candidates and less likely to vote for co-partisans. Experimental and unique observational data capturing participants' second-by-second reactions to the debates show that policy information was the most important causal mechanism driving partisan moderation, especially among strong partisans. A follow-up survey shows that these effects persist in electorally competitive communities, whereas they dissipate in party strongholds. Policy-centered debates have the potential to reduce partisan polarization in new democracies, but the local political context conditions the persistence of these effects.     

Predicting and Interpolating State‐Level Polls Using Twitter Textual Data

Spatially or temporally dense polling remains both difficult and expensive using existing survey methods. In response, there have been increasing efforts to approximate various survey measures using social media, but most of these approaches remain methodologically flawed. To remedy these flaws, this article combines 1,200 state‐level polls during the 2012 presidential campaign with over 100 million state‐located political tweets; models the polls as a function of the Twitter text using a new linear regularization feature‐selection method; and shows via out‐of‐sample testing that when properly modeled, the Twitter‐based measures track and to some degree predict opinion polls, and can be extended to unpolled states and potentially substate regions and subday timescales. An examination of the most predictive textual features reveals the topics and events associated with opinion shifts, sheds light on more general theories of partisan difference in attention and information processing, and may be of use for real‐time campaign strategy.     

Electoral Incentives and Partisan Conflict in Congress: Evidence from Survey Experiments

Does partisan conflict damage citizens’ perceptions of Congress? If so, why has polarization increased in Congress since the 1970s? To address these questions, we unpack the “electoral connection” by exploring the mass public's attitudes toward partisan conflict via two survey experiments in which we manipulated characteristics of members and Congress. We find that party conflict reduces confidence in Congress among citizens across the partisan spectrum. However, there exists heterogeneity by strength of party identification with respect to evaluations of members. Independents and weak partisans are more supportive of members who espouse a bipartisan image, whereas strong partisans are less supportive. People with strong attachments to a political party disavow conflict in the aggregate but approve of individual members behaving in a partisan manner. This pattern helps us understand why members in safely partisan districts engage in partisan conflict even though partisanship damages the collective reputation of the institution.     

Partisan Polarization and Congressional Accountability in House Elections

Early research led scholars to believe that institutional accountability in Congress is lacking because public evaluations of its collective performance do not affect the reelection of its members. However, a changed partisan environment along with new empirical evidence raises unanswered questions about the effect of congressional performance on incumbents' electoral outcomes over time. Analysis of House reelection races across the last several decades produces important findings: (1) low congressional approval ratings generally reduce the electoral margins of majority party incumbents and increase margins for minority party incumbents; (2) partisan polarization in the House increases the magnitude of this partisan differential, mainly through increased electoral accountability among majority party incumbents; (3) these electoral effects of congressional performance ratings hold largely irrespective of a member's individual party loyalty or seat safety. These findings carry significant implications for partisan theories of legislative organization and help explain salient features of recent Congresses.