Evaluating Measures of Campaign Tone

Research on framing effects has demonstrated how elites can influence public opinion by the way they present and interpret political issues. However, these findings overwhelmingly stem from experimental settings that differ from how issues are typically discussed in real-world political situations. This study takes framing research to more realistic contexts by exploiting a natural experiment to examine the neglected role of political parties in framing effects. Examining the effects on public opinion of a sudden shift in how a major political party frames a salient issue, I demonstrate that parties can be powerful in shaping the policy preferences among their supporters. Yet, even strong partisans do not follow the party line uncritically. Rather, they judge the party frame according to their own beliefs about the problems surrounding the issue. Thus, party elites face the challenge of developing frames that resonate with their voters' preexisting beliefs if they want to shape policy preferences, even among their otherwise most loyal supporters. These dynamics have important implications for understanding interactions between political elites and the public.     

Partisan Media and Engagement: A Field Experiment in a Newly Liberalized System

How does media exposure affect political engagement in newly liberalized systems? Some celebrate newly vibrant and diverse media, believing that they mobilize citizens. Others worry that these outlets, which are often partisan, dampen engagement. We theorize that exposure to political programming engenders interest in politics irrespective of program bias, but that interest does not necessarily beget action. Partisan media affect participation only when altering attitude strength, and thus motivations. To evaluate media effects on interest and participation, we conducted a field experiment in Ghana, in which subjects in tro-tros (commuter vans) were randomly exposed to different types of live talk radio. We find that partisan and nonpartisan media increased political interest, but not participation. Instead, exposure to alternate perspectives on cross-cutting media (i.e., those biased against subjects’ partisan preferences) heightened ambivalence and dampened participation, measured as signing a petition to parties. Partisan media simultaneously increased interest and decreased participation.     

How Much Is Too Much? Media Attention and Popular Support for an Insurgent Party

It is commonly observed that parties and candidates tend to receive coverage in the news media and attention in proportion to their electoral support. Although this norm serves to ensure that coverage is balanced or fair, news values often produce a different pattern of coverage in the television news media. This article considers the dynamic relationship between coverage in the news media and popular support for an insurgent party - the Reform party - in the 1993 Canadian election campaign. The analysis shows that coverage of Reform in the news media underwent an important change during the campaign that appears to have occurred before any change in popular support. While this change in attention to Reform was critical for Reform's ability to mobilize its potential electoral support, it also provides empirical support for the argument that there is an underlying equilibrium between the amount of coverage a party receives and its political support. Data for this analysis come from a campaign wave survey of vote intentions as part of the 1993 Canadian Election Study and a television content analysis of campaign news. The analysis applies an error-correction approach, which assumes an underlying equilibrium relationship, to model media access and vote intentions. The article thus expands the current applications of the error-correction technique while offering substantively important evidence of the political impacts of media decisions for the electoral support of new parties.     

Compensating the Losers: An Examination of Congressional Votes on Trade Adjustment Assistance

Globalization intensifies political conflict between citizens whose circumstances improve from foreign trade and those whose lives deteriorate as a result of trade. To pacify these rival interests, governments may assist citizens who become unemployed due to trade. When and under what conditions will legislators fund such assistance programs? The current study addresses this question by examining Congressional roll call votes in the United States during a period of rapid economic integration (1980–2004). The analysis reveals that protrade legislators who represent relatively more exporters are more likely to vote for increased spending on Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) programs. Exporters and their elected representatives arguably support such expenditures to broaden the protrade coalition.     

A journalism quarterly potpourri

Abstract

How do the news media help construct election mandates? By interpreting an election victory broadly, the news media can facilitate the implementation of a newly elected government's program. Conversely, the media can constrain a newly elected government by interpreting the election as influenced by factors other than ideology, primarily retrospective evaluations of the outgoing government's performance. Studies of how the media interpret election results have offered only speculation on why the media choose certain narratives while discarding plausible alternatives. Through a systematic examination of six Canadian elections, this article identifies key variables that explain the media's choices. I found that the media tended to confer a mandate when the victorious party focused on its policy intentions during the campaign and when the party was conservative; they tended to confer a “personal mandate” when newly elected leaders were facing their first election. In general, the news media quickly settled on one narrative, did not support this decision using quantitative data such as exit polls, and tended to depoliticize the public sphere by framing most results as devoid of ideological content.     

The election of women under proportional representation: The case of Malta

It has often been noted that women's opportunities for a legislative career are enhanced in countries using proportional representation. But in Malta, which uses a variant of proportional representation, there are fewer women in parliament than in any other Western democracy. A detailed analysis of voting data shows that what accounts for the paucity of women legislators in Malta is not a shortage of ballot positions; nor a lack of qualified women candidates; nor significant voter prejudice against female candidates. Rather, Malta's exceptional performance results from the unwillingness or inability of party elites to recruit a substantial number of women candidates, even though voting patterns create an incentive for political parties to maximize the number of candidates. Since the cause of this failure to mobilize more women candidates can be ascribed neither to the workings of the electoral system nor to voter behaviour, it will have to be sought in contextual factors that still work to stifle women's political careers. Malta's experience serves as a caution against optimistic expectations that the adoption of proportional representation will lead to greater legislative opportunities for women.     

Online Mobilization in Comparative Perspective: Digital Appeals and Political Engagement in Germany,Italy, and the United Kingdom

This study analyzes the relationship between online voter mobilization and political engagement in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the 2014 European election campaign. Internet surveys of samples representatives of these countries’ populations with Internet access show that respondents who received an invitation to vote for a party or candidate via e-mail or social media engaged in a significantly higher number of political activities than those who did not. Moreover, the relationship between mobilization and engagement was stronger among those who followed the campaign less attentively, as well as in countries where overall levels of engagement with the campaign were lower (Germany and the United Kingdom) than where they were higher (Italy). These findings indicate that online mobilization may contribute to closing gaps in political engagement at both individual and aggregate levels, and thus suggest that digital media may contribute to reviving democratic citizenship.     

Public opinion as a dependent variable: A framework for analysis

This paper outlines an approach to examining how public opinion is taken into consideration by political and governmental leaders and reviews recent studies that have followed this approach to evaluate the extent to which public opinion is subject to manipulation by political elites in diverse circumstances. The central idea of this approach is to treat public opinion as a “dependent variable” and to examine the role of the mass media in linking elite initiatives and the public. Instead of starting with polls that presume public opinion is an independent force, we start with elites and presume that they try to manipulate public opinion through the mass media and by other means. First, we look at why the emphasis on the independent nature of public opinion has become so prominent in political science. We argue here that viewing public opinion as a dependent variable is a more promising perspective. Next, we review and evaluate a number of studies that attempt to demonstrate the fruitfulness of our suggested approach. Each of the studies analyzed focuses on the initiatives of political elites and monitors the success of their efforts with targeted groups. These studies demonstrate the conditions that favor elite control as well as the opportunities for citizens to limit such control. In our conclusion, we outline a theory of the role of public opinion in modern mass democracies.     

Digital India? an email experiment with Indian legislators

ABSTRACT

Of the many tasks elected representatives perform, constituency service is among the most difficult to observe and, therefore, to measure. However, a burgeoning literature uses digital tools such as email to experimentally evaluate the responsiveness of political elites to requests for constituency service. To date, this literature has overwhelmingly focused on the developed world. In this article, we describe the results of an email experiment in which we sent plausible, but fictitious constituency service requests to national legislators in India to evaluate their responsiveness, helpfulness, and possibly discriminatory behavior. While the overall response rate to our request is quite poor, those that do respond tend to offer “meaningful” responses. We find scant evidence of legislators discriminating on religious lines.     

Following the News? Reception of Uncivil Partisan Media and the Use of Incivility in Political Expression

Partisan, pundit-based media gets blamed for making political discourse more uncivil, and studies on incivility in mediated discourse have found that uncivil political media can induce negative reactions in audiences. However, how use of uncivil media affects the way individuals express their political views has yet to receive substantial scholarly attention. I hypothesize that tuning in to uncivil political media leads to an increased propensity to use incivility in textual political expression. I develop an index to identify incivility in political expressions, and test my hypothesis using panel data analysis and an open-ended survey item in the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey. I find that, consistent with my hypothesis, use of uncivil media—specifically pundit cable news and political talk radio—leads to an increased use of incivility when expressing text-based political opinions. Furthermore, this only occurs with reception of like-minded uncivil political media. I note the implications this has for online political discourse and effective deliberation.     

A Review of: “Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers,by Pablo J. Boczkowski”

This study examines the way in which USA Today used tracking poll data in its strategy‐oriented coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign. Scrutiny of the methodological features of tracking polls suggests the news media's potential misuses of them. Studies on media polling lead to the general hypothesis that tracking polls serve the mass media as a device for generating news accounts that focus on candidate strategy. Using the ARIMA modeling technique, I conclude that as changes in the margin of difference between Bush and Clinton in the Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll increased, USA Today cited the poll results more frequently. The increase in the number of tracking poll references corresponded to an increase in the number of strategy‐oriented words in USA Today's campaign coverage. I discuss the implications within the context of the 1992 election campaign coverage.     

The National Press and Voting Turnout: British General Elections of 1992 and 1997

Britain is a good place to test hypotheses about the impact of the mass media on political attitudes and behavior, and this article uses the British Household Panel Survey to investigate the impact of the national daily press on turnout in the general elections of 1992 and 1997. The evidence does not support the hypothesis that reading a newspaper regularly helps to mobilize people on election day, but it also does not support the claim that the daily press--even the notorious British tabloid press--helps to induces political apathy. On the other hand, the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that those whose political attitudes and party identification are reinforced by the paper they read regularly are significantly more likely to vote than those whose attitudes and ID are cross pressured by the paper they read. As predicted, this newspaper effect is statistically significant but not large. The newspaper effect is larger in the close-fought election of 1992 than in the landslide Labour victory in 1997. And it is larger for the "Labour reinforced" than the "Conservative reinforced." The article concludes that the British national press has a statistically significant effect on political behavior in the form of turnout in British elections, especially when election results are close. This, in turn, suggests that the extent to which the Conservative press dominated daily circulation in Britain during 1945-1992, may have helped the Conservative party win elections.     

Constructing Explanations for U.S. State Governors’ Races: The Abortion Issue and the 1990 Gubernatorial Elections

Election results do not, by themselves, explain what specific policies voters want. So reporters and the politicians and activists they cover engage in a process of constructing explanations for the vote totals, to achieve their respective aims. This study examines the conditions in which a potentially influential issueabortion rights after the Webster decisionwas interpreted as an explanation for gubernatorial election outcomes in 1990. Data show that explanations constructed for the vote totals in newspaper coverage often differed from the findings of state exit polls. Abortion was more likely to be interpreted as a cause of the vote when the race was one-sided, when the candidates differed more clearly in their stands on abortion, and when some aspect of their stands fit the medias need to portray drama and conflict. Findings suggest that media norms as to what is news influence the process of constructing explanations for election results.     

Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End,by Nina Eliasoph

Extant research is not very specific about when the media matter for vote choice. In this study, we test multiple theories about the influences of the media on vote choice in 21 countries. The European Parliamentary (EP) election campaign offers a unique research context to test these influences. We rely on a two-wave panel survey conducted in 21 European Union (EU) member states, asking both vote intentions before the campaign and reported actual votes (among 14,000 voters). We link these data to media content data of campaign coverage between the two waves in these countries (37,000 coded news items). We conclude that media evaluations of the EU affect voting for Eurosceptic parties. On average, the more positive the evaluations of the EU a voter is exposed to, the less likely she or he is to cast a vote for a Eurosceptic party. In addition, our findings indicate that in countries where political parties have markedly different views on EU issues, the more a voter is exposed to framing of the EU in terms of benefits derived from membership in these countries, the less likely she or he is to cast a Eurosceptic vote. This suggests that the outcome of the 2009 EP elections was influenced by how the media covered EU-related news during the campaign.     

Assessing the Television Campaign: The Impact of Party Election Broadcasting on Voters' Opinions in the 1997 British General Election

Although paid television and radio political advertising is banned in the United Kingdom, parties fielding sufficient candidates are entitled to free air time during election campaigns for a fixed number of party election broadcasts (PEBs). Over the years, parties have experimented with a variety of different PEB formats. But the impact of PEBs on voters is underresearched. This article therefore analyzes the influence of PEB viewing in the 1997 British General Election. Though a majority do not view PEBs, those who do are influenced by them, especially in terms of their evaluations of parties and their leaders: Other things being equal, viewers of a party's PEBs become more favorably disposed to the party and its leader than those who do not see the broadcast. Labour and Conservative PEBs have no impact on vote intentions, however. But viewers of Liberal Democrat broadcasts become more likely to support that party. We speculate that this reflects different background levels of media exposure for the major parties as compared to the third party.     

The Social Basis of Voting Correctly

A large literature has established that people learn from political discussion, and some scholars suggest that people will make better choices if they engage in political discussion with opinion leaders. To establish that discussion promotes better vote choices, however, we have to create a measure of rational choice to test the impact of discussion. Recently, scholars have used Lau and Redlawsk's voting correctly measure to test the impact of various influences on the rationality of vote choice. Using this new measure of rationality—voting correctly—I determine whether political discussion has the predicted positive impact. To test this theory, I use 2000 American National Election Study survey data, and show that greater political discussion with knowledgeable discussants leads to more correct voting.     

世博会与我国公共外交

公共外交是一国政府通过信息传播、文化交流、大众媒体、民意调查和支持非政府组织等形式影响国外民众，扩大本国政府、公民与国外民众的对话，减少他国公众对本国的错误观念，提高本国在国外公众中的形象和国际影响力，进而增进本国国家利益的外交方式。世博会为我国开展公共外交提供了一个盛大的平台，也成为中国面向全世界的“公共外交”新舞台。     

Following the Party in Time of War? The Implications of Elite Consensus

Prominent perspectives in the study of conflict point to two factors that exert substantial influence on public opinion about foreign intervention: (1) news about casualties and (2) signals from partisan elites. Past work is limited, however, in what it can say about how these two factors interact. We present an experiment designed to understand the surprisingly common scenario where elites send competing messages about whether the public should support war or oppose it—and these messages do not coincide with party divisions. We find that partisans are generally insensitive to news about casualties, but they become noticeably more sensitive when they perceive within-party disputes over support for the war. Independents, however, respond to news of casualties irrespective of what messages elites send. These findings shed light on when and how the public responds to competing and unclear cues and speak to the role of public opinion in determining conflict outcomes and democratic foreign policy-making more broadly.     

Do Online Ads Influence Vote Choice?

Do online ads influence vote choice? We partner with a German party to evaluate the effectiveness of online ads using a cluster-randomized experiment. During the 2016 Berlin state election, 189 postal districts were randomly assigned to (a) emotional ads; (b) factual ads; or (c) no ads. Analyzing electoral results at the postal district level, we find that the overall campaign weakly increased the party’s vote share by 0.7 percentage points (p-value = 0.155). We also estimate a negative effect of the campaign on the vote share of the party’s main competitors of 1.4 percentage points (p-value = 0.094). Turning to the mechanism of persuasion, we find that the factual ads, if anything, fared slightly better than the emotional ads. Our evidence thus provides tentative support that online ads positively affect vote choice.     

Is Any Publicity Good Publicity? Media Coverage,Party Institutions,and Authoritarian Power-Sharing

Existing literature identifies nonofficial media as a tool for rulers to gather information from below. We argue that such media also help identify threats among elites. Motivated by profit, partially free media tend to cover politicians who challenge implicit norms of the regime. These political elites are perceived as threats to the power-sharing status quo, which leads peers to sanction them. We test this argument with evidence from the Chinese Communist Party’s intraparty elections of alternate Central Committee members in 2012 and 2007. With Bayesian rank likelihood models, we find that candidates who appeared more frequently in various partially free media received fewer votes from the Party Congress delegates, and this pattern is robust after accounting for a series of alternative explanations. Detailed case studies also show that low-ranked candidates have more partially free media coverage because they broke party norms.