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.     

The Strategic Importance of State-Level Factors in Presidential Elections

While political scientists usually rely on national models ofpresidential elections, the candidates and their campaign staffstend to focus on state-by-state strategies. This study testshypotheses that presidential candidates and their parties canincrease their support in specific states through the strategicselection of their national-party convention sites and theirvice-presidential running mates. This study also assesses thecommon assertion that candidates receive an electoral boostin states with incumbent governors from the same party. Utilizinga normed model of the presidential vote in the states that servesas a baseline for assessing the importance of these strategicfactors, the study finds that presidential and vice-presidentialcandidates receive an electoral advantage in their home statesand regions. Generally, parties do not derive significant electoralbenefits in states selected to host the national conventionor those in which they control the governorship. Important differencesare found over time and between the two political parties.     

Issues and the presidential primary voter

Most agree that voting in presidential general elections is largely contingent on the evaluations of the candidates, issues, and parties. Yet inpresidential primary elections the determinants of voter choices are less clear. Partisanship is inconsequential, information about candidate personalities and policy positions is scarce, and a fourth factor, expectations, may influence voters. In this paper, we reconsider the influence ofpolitical issues in presidential primaries. We argue that past work has not adequately considered how issues matter in primary elections. Primaries are intraparty affairs, and the political issues that typically divide the parties are not very relevant in primaries. Instead, we focus on the policy issues each candidate chooses to emphasize in their quest for the nomination, which we call policy priorities. With data gathered about media coverage of the presidential contenders in the 1988 primaries, and using exit poll data from the 1988 Super Tuesday primaries, we show that issues, as policy priorities, do matter in presidential primary elections. This research also implies that primary campaigns matter, since information concerning the policy priorities of the candidates reaches the intended audience.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL, April 1992.     

Political Branding: Political Candidates Positioning Based on Inter-Object Associative Affinity Index

The article presents the conception of positioning politicians based on a three-stage approach to political branding. The main assumption is that a political brand—and politician's image as its crucial component—is conceptualized as consisting of a node in memory to which a variety of associations are linked. These associations—positive, negative, or neutral—must be shared with other rival candidates as well as with an prototypical ideal candidate, understood as a model and standard of comparison while developing detailed marketing strategies. One of the most valuable methods that has been used to measure these associations is associative overlap technique developed by Szalay. This measure is based on free verbal associations and it expresses the degree of similarity among objects (words, persons, groups) based on the number of similar responses (associations) they elicit in common. The first stage of branding, candidates’ positioning in various segments of voters, focuses on such affinity between politicians and is based on multidimensional scaling techniques. At the second stage, mutual relationships between particular elements (positive and negative, common and distinctive), of which a politician's image consists, are defined. The third level of political branding links the results of positioning to voters’ decisions. This framework of branding political candidates is presented on the basis of empirical research focused on Polish presidential candidates’ perception and evaluation in the 2005 presidential election. The results of the performed research show that it is not only the strengthening of politicians’ positive features but also neutralizing the negative ones that contributes to his higher expected quality.     

Revitalizing the United States‐Japanese alliance

Abstract

While the notion that subjective economic perceptions as well as objective economic conditions affect electoral outcomes has long been explored in advanced democracies and new democracies, evidence of the link between the economy and elections has been rarely found in East Asian countries. As economic issues have become salient since the 1997 financial crisis, political leaders’ capacity to manage the economy has become one of the most important criteria in electoral choice in East Asia. This paper examines how economic issues influenced the results of the 2007 presidential election in South Korea. By making use of the 2007 Presidential Election Panel Study, this study examines the continuity of and changes in the Korean voters’ electoral behavior. This study describes the political situation in the post-1997 financial crisis period under two liberal governments in Korea and introduces the processes and characteristics of electoral campaigns in the 2007 presidential election. This paper then explores the link between the economy and vote choice, focusing on whether economic issues were salient among the electorate, whether retrospective or prospective economic voting was prevalent among Koreans, and how the voters supported Lee Myung Bak across age groups, regions, and parties in the 2007 presidential election.     

Candidates’ policy strategies in primary elections: does strategic voting by the primary electorate matter?

Empirical research reports conflicting conclusions about whether primary election voters strategically account for candidates’ general election prospects when casting their votes. We model the strategic calculations of office-seeking candidates facing two-stage elections beginning with a primary, and we compare candidates’ policy strategies in situations where primary voters strategically support the most viable general election candidate against candidate strategies when voters expressively support their preferred primary candidate regardless of electability. Our analyses—in which the candidates’ appeal is based on their policy positions and their campaigning skills—suggest a surprising conclusion: namely, that strategic and expressive primary voting typically support identical equilibrium configurations in candidate strategies. Our conclusions are relevant to candidates facing contested primaries, and also to political parties facing the strategic decision about whether or not to use primary elections to select their candidates—a common dilemma for Latin American (and some European) parties.     

The Mobilization of Core Supporters: Campaigns, Turnout, and Electoral Composition in United States Presidential Elections

Our objective is to investigate the relationship between presidential campaign activities and political mobilization in the states, with specific focus on the mobilization of core constituents. Using data on presidential campaign visits, presidential campaign media purchases, and party transfers to the states, we highlight some interesting mobilization patterns. First, voter turnout is positively influenced by presidential campaigns, though not by all campaign activities. Second, there is some evidence that campaigns have direct effects on the participation of core partisan groups. Finally, the ability of parties to mobilize their core groups has a strong effect on state electoral success that exists over and above the direct effect of campaign activity on electoral outcomes. All in all, we see the results as strong evidence that political mobilization in general and party transfers to the states in particular are an important component for understanding campaign effects in presidential elections.     

“Market” Classification and Political Campaigning

ABSTRACT

There is an argument for a flow of logic from market structure to marketing strategy and performance. The nature of the political “market” and service-product constrains and dictates marketing strategy choices. Interactions between the voter, parties, and candidates in political campaigns could be likened to human services (Dickens, 1996) in commerce. However, parties and candidates operate in peculiar poligopolistic markets competing for the authority to deliver government services through an exclusive right of franchise bidding process similar to that in business-to-business markets. A structure-conduct-performance model is presented based on an analysis of political markets from consumer, industrial, and services marketing perspectives to provide strategic marketing insights. Political marketing is a hybrid subdiscipline of marketing incorporating characteristics from all three major marketing paradigms, with services marketing theory holding particular promise for future theory development.     

Forming Political Culture and Marketing Strategies in a Central-European Setting

ABSTRACT

Having analyzed the different strategies used in the 1998 and 2002 parliamentary election campaigns with reference to the 1990 and 1994 campaigns, we can conclude that the Hungarian election conventions and culture are still in a state of experimentation and exploration. In contrast with American election traditions, in Hungary, not the individual (with the exception of the Alliance of Young Democrats), but the party image is what counts, though, in this respect, considerable changes could be observed during the last few years. The Hungarian political palette is much too fragmented, and this sets a barrier to the necessary desire for creating a suitable forum for the debate of the party leaders and for the declaration of party politics. At present, the party programme reaches the citizens just in implicit, hidden, often symbolic forms of messages.

While the symbols of the left-wing parties were sketchy, unskillful, too rational, and not giving much space for emotional influence, the right-wing parties gave too large of a dose of different symbols, which were emotional rather than rational. This lack of balance made the campaigns superficial, irrational, sometimes misleading, and abnormal. This feeling of abnormality was strengthened by the fact that the overdose on the part of the right wing was not limited to the campaign period, but the emotional shocking started much earlier. The state of excitement, which was spread in time, actually started in the spring of 1998, and even if there were fluctuations, the general mood of the last four years was characterised by the dug-out hatchet. The political opinion of the Orbán party was clearly expressed by their metaphors. The message of the sentences like 'it is more than change of government, less than change of regime,' 'attacking on the whole field,' 'we change the telephone directories,' etc., was unambiguous: combative four years are coming. During their campaign, 'setting up a record' was realized between the two rounds after the failure in the first round and was still going on showing the election failure, which came about in democratic circumstances (Galló Béla, 2002, 93).

One could hardly judge the effectiveness of agenda building, though some of the crucial social questions appeared as cue words and sentences in the mediated messages of parties (for example, family, health care, education, joining the European Union). Hungarian campaigning, compared to the American presidential election campaign, is colorless and rife with technical and rhetorical errors, and it is a competition without any coherence where the citizen is very often just a means of, but not the goal in, the struggle of the parties.     

What accounts for Duverger's law? The behavioral mechanisms underpinning two-party convergence in India

Duverger's Law states the single-member district plurality rules should produce two-party competition. In district-level election races where this expectation holds, what political behaviors—ranging from elites' strategic formation of political parties to voters' strategic abandonment of losing candidates—account for these outcomes? Using data from state elections in India, this article demonstrates that no single mechanism accounts for most electoral outcomes consistent with Duverger's Law. However, mechanisms related to the behavior elites, far more than voters, produce convergence on two-party competition. This article uncovers relatively little evidence of outcomes driven by strategic voting, instead finding that much of the convergence on two parties is attributable to various forms of strategic entry in which parties selectively field candidates in certain races. In particular, elite collusion—when multiple parties coordinate on where to field candidates—is especially important. Data from other countries confirm that these findings are not unique to India.     

Priming the Parish Pump

Abstract

In this article we argue that the almost exclusive focus of political communications research on national political actors and agencies has led to an inadequate understanding of the functioning, the relevance, and the influence of local political communications strategies. This paper seeks to redress this neglect through exploring political marketing strategies of national political actors and agencies which have implications for local political communications; and political marketing strategies of local political actors and agencies and their implications for local political communications, with specific reference to the local newspaper coverage of the local campaign in the 2001 UK General Election. Drawing on a unique and extensive analysis of local newspapers' election reporting, combined with detailed interviews with journalists, editors, politicians and their agents, we argue that news management strategies enacted at a local level were characterised by an exchange relationship in which, although parties traded information for editorial space, the local news media retained a dominant role. Thus, although parties were, to differing degrees, successful in securing coverage of their candidates and policies, this success was always achieved in the context of local newspapers setting the broader agenda.     

Individualisierte Wahlkämpfe im Wahlkreis. Eine Analyse am Beispiel des Bundestagswahlkampfes von 2005

Constituency campaigns are an important subject matter for students of political parties, voting behavior and political communication. In all three fields, constituency campaigns are perceived as elements of centralized high-tech campaigns strategically targeting particular segments in electoral markets. In this paper, we propose an alternative understanding of local campaigns and use the case of the German Parliamentary Elections in 2005 to provide empirical evidence for this view. We analyze constituency campaigns from an actor-centred perspective, which assumes local campaigns to signal independence of individual candidates from their parties. We label this phenomenon individualized campaigning. We argue that individualized campaigning is, on the one hand, driven by changing electoral markets. On the other hand, we argue, however, that electoral incentives and particular types of electoral competitiveness foster individualized constituency campaigning. We test this latter hypothesis with regard to the German mixed-member electoral system and on the basis of a survey of all candidates standing for election in 2005.     

Macro Research on Campaign Mobilization in the United States

ABSTRACT

This essay reviews the macro or aggregate-level academic literature on campaign mobilization and voter turnout in the United States. The conclusion that emerges from this literature is that hard-fought, high-stimulus electoral contests get out the vote. In part, the level of turnout on election day is a product of the efforts of strategic political actors (e.g., candidates, campaign contributors, and political parties) in the pursuit of elective office. The essay suggests that the academic literature on campaign mobilization would benefit from greater appreciation of how real world campaigns operate. A lesson that academics should draw from the practitioners is that strategic campaigns target and attempt to get out their voters. Careful consideration of the flows of information in campaigns would lead to a richer theory of mobilization. Looking at campaigns in a differentiated fashion, future research should recognize some fundamental points about their turnout implications: what campaigns do and whom they target may be more important than simply how much they do.     

What Does Credibility Look like? Tweets and Walls in U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Visual Storytelling

This study considers the social media visual messaging of four candidates in the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential primary campaign. The analysis is guided by symbolic convergence theory, its method of fantasy theme analysis, and visual rhetoric theory. Using a schema of visual attributes, this study analyzes a rhetorical strategy of candidates' campaigns: the pictorial “public diary” found on their official Facebook and Twitter pages. It reveals how the credibility character traits of trustworthiness and expertise appear in the candidates' visual narratives, what messages dominate, and how candidates differ in succeeding or failing to visually communicate credibility. This study has important implications for how political management can use images in crafting and assessing messaging strategies in a competitive environment.     

Communicating Party Labels and Names on Twitter During the 2016 Presidential Invisible Primary and Primary Campaigns

This study investigated the use of party and ideological labels and candidate names in major party candidate tweets (N?=?94,310) during the 2016 presidential preprimary and primary campaigns to understand the extent to which candidates focused on intraparty and interparty themes as a part of their marketing strategies. The results show that the candidates and their campaigns did not engage in heavy partisan labeling to cultivate their social media identities. Outsider candidates were not more likely to use party or ideological labels in their tweets than insider candidates were. The candidates focused on self-advocacy in their tweets.     

Presidential image and economic performance: A dynamic analysis

How do people form and revise their images of the president's personal characteristics? While analysts have made considerable progress in uncovering the content, structure, and political impact of images of political figures—especially presidential candidates—we know very little about how these beliefs develop and change over time. This study of change and stability in presidential images is based on two contrasting theoretical perspectives. Research by several rational choice theorists suggests that individuals base their images of the president's personal characteristics on observations of presidential performance and these images remain open to revision, based on new performance evaluations. Research on social cognition, however, suggests that early impressions tend to maintain themselves by biasing performance evaluations. These perspectives guide an examination of five-wave panel data in an effort to determine the extent to which people's evaluations of the president's handling of economic problems influence, and are influenced by, general images of the president's competence.     

The Erosion of Party Politics in Britain

This article looks at the erosion of democratic practice enacted by "New" Labour in Britain under the leadership of Tony Blair. Building on the internal reforms of the 1980s, the process of Labour Party "modernization" has created an exclusive, top-down managerial style of leadership. This type of party leadership and management has far-reaching implications for British politics more generally, not least the role of political parties. The current crisis of the Conservatives and the destruction of representative democracy within the Labour Party pose serious questions regarding the medium-term future of parties as voluntary membership organizations. These changes are placed in the context of a possible longer-term transformation of British political structures in order to exchange the long-established administration of the Conservative Party for a new type of governmental machinery. The aim is not a new "traditional" party of government, but a partyless formation built around a dominant central presidential figure and his office—a change which necessitates abolishing the Labour Party and social democracy as they currently exist. It is argued that this anticipated remedy to a protracted crisis of the British state accords closely to the requirements of neoliberal economic management, while drawing upon developments in the wider global environment. However, if this is to succeed, Blair's "modernizing" tendency needs to be able to articulate a coherent ideology that strikes a popular chord. Thus far, Blair's managerial approach to politics may have scored a few points against the old party ideologies, but it has also undermined attempts to promote an alternative ideology—even one of a "partyless" nature.     

Do Primaries Improve Electoral Performance? Clientelism and Intra‐Party Conflict in Ghana

We consider the effect of legislative primaries on the electoral performance of political parties in a new democracy. While existing literature suggests that primaries may either hurt a party by selecting extremist candidates or improve performance by selecting high valence candidates or improving a party’s image, these mechanisms may not apply where clientelism is prevalent. A theory of primaries built instead on a logic of clientelism with intra‐party conflict suggests different effects of legislative primaries for ruling and opposition parties, as well as spillover effects for presidential elections. Using matching with an original dataset on Ghana, we find evidence of a primary bonus for the opposition party and a primary penalty for the ruling party in the legislative election, while legislative primaries improve performance in the presidential election in some constituencies for both parties.     

Spinning on the Conference Circuit

ABSTRACT

Making sure political parties receive comprehensive and favourable media coverage is a full-time activity that extends beyond the period of election campaigns. In the era of the permanent campaign the annual autumn conferences of the main British political parties represent a publicity opportunity. The undivided media coverage of these events provides a platform for the political parties to sell themselves and their policies to a national audience beyond the conference venue, but also presents considerable risks. To ensure that they successfully exploit this publicity opportunity the party managers, with the aid of communication experts, both control the conferences and implement media management strategies. This article examines how the parties have adapted their conferences to sell themselves and their policies. It highlights the public relations techniques that are employed to ensure that party policy gains the desired positive news coverage and that the coverage of potentially damaging events is minimized. It concludes by considering the impact this marketing driven logic has on the party conferences and their media coverage.     

Candidate and party affective polarization in U.S. presidential elections: The person-negativity bias?

We investigate the degree of affective polarization in presidential election years toward the two major parties and their nominees. Notwithstanding studies which show that individuating information about an out-group member can generate a person-positivity bias, we demonstrate a person-negativity bias directed at out-party candidates at least for some. We motivate and test two hypotheses: first, we expect more sophisticated partisans to display a greater difference in their feelings towards specific candidates compared to evaluations of the parties themselves; second, we anticipate sophisticated partisans will exhibit a person-negativity bias toward out-party candidates and a person-positivity bias toward in-party candidates. The results accentuate the conditional nature of the person-positivity bias and shed light on how political sophistication is linked to affective polarization.