Campaigning on behalf of the party? Party constraints on candidate campaign personalisation

This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.     

Evidence on the importance of spatial voting models in presidential nominations and elections

ADA scores and Nominate scores are used for the first time to examine the influence of spatial voting records on which candidate wins the party’s presidential nomination and on which nominee wins the general election. We find that the most conservative Republican candidate and moderately liberal Democrats were most likely to win their party’s nomination. For general elections we find that the candidate’s spatial record has nearly as much impact on the outcome as economic growth, which has been the focus of most past empirical research. The nominee whose voting record is more moderate is more likely to be elected.     

The impact of cuing candidate quality on female candidates

How can parties improve the electoral prospects of traditionally under-represented women? We argue that if a party signals that a single female candidate is of high quality, other women appearing on the ballot with her will receive a boost in support. More specifically, if a female candidate heads a party's list in the district, other women from her party will be rewarded with more votes. We test our reasoning by examining the nomination and election of women in three Free-List Proportional Representation systems where voters can cast multiple preference votes for individual candidates. We find robust support for the finding that when voters receive a signal that women can be quality candidates, they tend to reward additional women with preference votes regardless of their rank on the ballot.     

The Effectiveness of a Racialized Counterstrategy

Our article examines whether a politician charging a political candidate's implicit racial campaign appeal as racist is an effective political strategy. According to the racial priming theory, this racialized counterstrategy should deactivate racism, thereby decreasing racially conservative whites’ support for the candidate engaged in race baiting. We propose an alternative theory in which racial liberals, and not racially conservative whites, are persuaded by this strategy. To test our theory, we focused on the 2016 presidential election. We ran an experiment varying the politician (by party and race) calling an implicit racial appeal by Donald Trump racist. We find that charging Trump's campaign appeal as racist does not persuade racially conservative whites to decrease support for Trump. Rather, it causes racially liberal whites to evaluate Trump more unfavorably. Our results hold up when attentiveness, old‐fashioned racism, and partisanship are taken into account. We also reproduce our findings in two replication studies.     

Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawai‘i

ABSTRACT

Okamura reviews the 2008 US presidential campaign and the election of Barack Obama as a ‘post-racial candidate’ in terms of two different meanings of ‘post-racialism’, namely, colour blindness and multiculturalism. He also discusses his campaign and election from the perspective of Asian America and Hawai'i given that Obama has been claimed as ‘the first Asian American president’ and as a ‘local’ person from Hawai‘i where he was born and spent most of his youth. In both cases, Obama has been accorded these racialized identities primarily because of particular cultural values he espouses and cultural practices he engages in that facilitate his seeming transcendence of racial boundaries and categories generally demarcated by phenotype and ancestry. Okamura contends that proclaiming Obama as an honorary Asian American and as a local from Hawai‘i inadvertently lends support to the post-racial America thesis and its false assertion of the declining significance of race: first, by reinforcing the ‘model minority’ stereotype of Asian Americans and, second, by affirming the widespread view of Hawai‘i as a model of multiculturalism.     

Nomination rules and the calculus of mobilization: Theory and evidence from Mexico

Does party organization shape candidates’ electoral mobilization efforts? I develop a novel theoretical account linking candidate selection rules to electoral mobilization. Nomination rules that require aspiring candidates to compete in electoral races, such as primary elections, create incentives for them to make considerable investments in order to win the party’s nomination. Using a decision-theoretic model, I show how these initial investments at the nomination stage shape the candidates’ mobilization expenditures in the general election. The main theoretical result establishes that primaries increase candidates’ mobilization efforts only when the general election is not expected to be competitive; when a close race is expected, candidates mobilize at the same rates regardless of how they were nominated. Analysis of an original dataset on candidate selection and electoral mobilization in Mexico provides strong support for the theory.     

Candidate positioning in Britain

Policy positioning has received a great deal of attention from scholars of British politics. While numerous studies emphasize the positions taken by the Labour and Conservative parties, and how the positions of these parties have shaped citizens’ electoral behavior, few studies explore policy positioning at the candidate-level. We conduct the first quantitative study that examines the relative policy positions of British candidates during a general election. Building on findings from the study of American elections, we argue that two factors explain variation in candidate positioning in Britain: constituency-level electoral competition and a disparity in candidate quality. Using data from the 2001 British Representation Study, we find evidence that both factors are associated with a decrease in the policy contrast between candidates. Our findings suggest that, despite the differences in party control, similar factors affect candidate positioning in both Great Britain and the United States.     

The Party's Primary Preferences: Race,Gender, and Party Support of Congressional Primary Candidates

Party support has a strong influence on candidate success in the primary. What remains unexplored is whether party actions during the primary are biased along racial and gender lines. Using candidate demographic data at the congressional level and measures of party support for primary candidates, we test whether parties discriminate against women and minority candidates in congressional primaries and also whether parties are strategic in their support of minority candidates in certain primaries. Our findings show parties are not biased against minority candidates and also that white women candidates receive more support from the Democratic Party than do other types of candidates. Our findings also suggest that parties do not appear to strategically support minority candidates in districts with larger populations of minorities. Lastly, we also find no significant differences in the effects of party support on the likelihood of success in the primary by candidate race or gender.     

从衡阳贿选案看地方人大选举制度的改革与完善

地方人大贿选的本质是金钱政治、权钱交易,它给国家和社会造成的危害是严重的。衡阳贿选案是地方人大贿选中较为典型的案例,深刻地暴露出我国地方人大选举制度的设计缺陷,如候选人提名制度不合理、缺乏相应的竞选机制、监督机制和处罚机制不完善等。推进地方人大制度的健全和完善,要建立规范的代表候选人提名制度,扩大选民和代表联合提名候选人的比例;在选举中切实落实差额选举制度,引入正当竞选机制;健全监督机制,加大处罚力度。     

A deterrent to diversity: The conditional effect of electoral rules on the nomination of women candidates

Previous literature regarding the effects of electoral systems on candidate selection has implied a false dichotomy regarding proportional representation (PR) versus single member districts (SMD). This paper unpacks the category of proportional representation, and finds significant differences in the behavior of selectorates depending on their configuration of PR. Using both a natural experiment as well as an original data set comprised of 1095 party lists, I find that the type of proportional representation – i.e., whether or not the voters are allowed to pick a particular candidate from the party list – can have a significant effect on the number of women candidates selected to run for office. Further, I find that the strength of this effect depends on cultural gender norms; if a substantial segment of society believes that women are best in traditional roles, not as leaders, there is a significant, negative effect of the decisive intraparty preference vote on the nomination of women candidates.     

Racial attitudes and emotional responses to the 2016 Republican candidates

ABSTRACT

We argue that both Obama ‘08 and Trump ‘16 benefited from unusually high enthusiasm generated during their respective campaigns, and these emotions conditioned underlying racial attitudes – albeit in different ways – to pave the way to the White House. Racial animosity is usually studied in the context of minority candidates, but in the 2016 election, Donald Trump (a white candidate) frequently made direct attacks on immigrants and foreigners. This study examines how emotions generated during the campaigns and racial resentment, which we consider a preexisting attitude, shaped voter evaluations of the 2016 presidential candidates in the general election and Republican primaries. Drawing on original telephone survey data from the highly salient GOP Iowa caucuses and national opinion data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we find that racial resentment interacted with positive emotions (enthusiasm) to increase support for Trump. The effect of racial attitudes in predicting favorable evaluations of Trump disappeared or diminished to a quarter of its original size when emotional responses to the candidate were measured. The study generalizes a framework about the interactive effect of existing racial attitudes and campaign-generated emotions to apply to both white and minority candidates.     

Party knowledge and candidate knowledge: constituency campaigning and voting and the 1997 British General Election

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the electoral impact of constituency campaigns in British General Elections. Much is now known about the electoral consequences of local campaigns on parties’ constituency vote shares. Yet more remains to be discovered about the impacts of these local campaigns on voters’ knowledge of parties and candidates. Analysis of data from the 1997 British General Election demonstrates that the local campaign is associated with improved voter knowledge of who is standing for each party in a constituency, which is, in its turn, associated with an increased chance of voting for the party in the election, other things being equal. Campaign efforts at different scales, from the national to the local, have different impacts on voters’ knowledge.     

Sexism predicts favorability of women in the 2020 democratic primary… and men?

Considerable research has examined the role of sexism and vote choice, especially within the context of the 2016 presidential election. These findings are clear, consistent, and unequivocal – sexism hurt Hillary Clinton at the ballot box. However, the 2020 presidential primary provides an opportunity to examine sexism's effects on candidate favorability among a broader range of candidates. Using data on candidate favorability from the 2019 VOTER survey, I find that sexism is unsurprisingly predictive of lower favorability of women running for the Democratic nomination. However, I also find that sexism influences support for men running for the nomination, in a way that is statistically indistinguishable from its effect on support for women. This effect persists even among only Democratic respondents.     

Scripted Messengers: How Party Discipline and Branding Turn Election Candidates and Legislators into Brand Ambassadors

Political parties with strict party discipline are well-placed to demand that their election candidates and legislators promote the party brand. The franchise-franchisee relationship causes representatives to relinquish individual expression in exchange for centralized party messaging. This article looks at how a strategic desire for party unity combines with internal brand management to turn lower-ranking politicians in a parliamentary system into party brand ambassadors. Our Canadian case study draws on in-depth interviews with party leaders, Members of Parliament, political staff, candidates for office and prospective candidates. The implications for representative democracy in a Westminster system are considered, including the representational constraints for racial and sexual minorities.     

Big expectations, small outcomes: The impact of leaders' personal appeal in the 2004 Greek election

The 2004 Greek election provides an interesting case study for examining the impact of party leaders on the vote. A change in governing party leadership a few months before polling day had two important implications. First, it generated a highly favourable context for the emergence of decisive leadership effects. Second, it made it feasible to grasp empirically how voters form their evaluations of new leaders. Regarding the first question, the findings indicate that even in the most favourable environment the impact of leadership evaluations on the overall electoral outcome is only slight. Regarding the second, it seems that the change of leader at the start of an election campaign can be a mixed blessing. Whereas it can help a party to divert media and public focus from other less favourable issues, the party pays a corresponding price when its new leader has to learn the job in the full glare of an election campaign.     

Multi-level muddling: Candidate strategies to “nationalize” local elections

Comparative literature has identified how political parties at subnational levels strategically refer to the performance of parties or policy issues at national level to varying degrees. Building upon these studies on multi-level electoral dynamics, the article demonstrates how individual legislative candidates, and not just parties, selectively adopt what we call “cross-level electoral appeals”(CLEAs): campaign messages which emphasize issues, performances, and actors in levels of government other than that which the candidate or party is seeking office. Advancing existing conceptualizations of nationalization, we posit that there are mainly three types of such CLEAs, those in which local candidates: 1) praise or criticize a specific national policy or 2) performance of the national government; or 3) emphasize personal linkages to national-level parties or politicians. The article investigates the potential factors which lead to more frequent CLEAs by observing candidate manifestos for local legislative elections in Japan. We use an original dataset from a sample of prefectures differently affected by specific national policies, candidates affiliated to parties differing in organizational centralization and from districts varying in seat magnitude as well as incumbent party popularity. To test hypotheses about national and local level party popularity as well as district-level variables on the frequency of such appeals, the article analyzed the data set using the novel methodology of not just counting, but also measuring the surface area of specific appeals in candidate manifestos. Through regression analysis, we find evidence of national government party popularity leading to more frequency of local candidate CLEAs. We also find that local candidates who are more dependent on the party vote (i.e. those in smaller district magnitudes and in centralized party organizations) are more prone to certain types of CLEAs.     

The legislative consequences of Mexico’s mixed-member electoral system, 2000–2009

The emergence of mixed-member electoral systems across the globe has been an attempt to balance local representation through single-member districts (SMD) with programmatic representation through proportional representation lists (PR). However, there are several competing theoretical interpretations for the consequences of mixed systems on legislative bodies. Through a study of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, I test several empirical implications of these competing theories by examining the impact of the electoral system on party discipline, participation, and legislative organization. I find little convincing evidence of differences between legislators elected through PR and those elected through SMD in their levels of party discipline, but I do find that PR legislators participate in a manner theoretically consistent with their mode of election. I also find that PR legislators have disproportionate control over key leadership positions. I suggest the primary reasons for these findings is due to differing methods of candidate selection and restricted use of dual candidacy.     

The politics of disgruntlement: Nonvoting and defection among supporters of nomination losers, 1968–1984

This paper focuses on the effect of disgruntlement among those primary voters who supported U.S. presidential nomination losers. It analyzes the general election voting behavior of primary voters in the last five presidential elections in order to determine if differences exist between those supporters of the winning nominee in each party and backers of other candidates who also sought the nomination. A multivariate analysis of the determinants of voter turnout shows significant results only for the Democrats in 1972, when primary voters who supported candidates other than George McGovern were more likely to abstain in the general election. Taking into account the option of defecting to another party in November, both parties appear to have been plagued by a considerable amount of disloyalty on the part of supporters of candidates who failed to win the nomination, although for the Republicans this type of response is confined to the 1980 election. The existence of a third party or independent candidacy may be an important variable influencing the behavior of these disgruntled primary voters.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30–September 2, 1984.     

The rise of the opposition party in Taiwan: explaining Chen Shui-bian’s victory in the 2000 Presidential election

The 2000 Taiwan presidential election drastically changed Taiwan’s political landscape. For the first time in Taiwan, an opposition party candidate, Chen Shui-bian, won the presidential race, receiving 39.3% of the popular vote. To understand the factors that determined the election’s outcome, we analyze survey data from the 2000 presidential election. First, we study whether a divided ruling party was the cause of the opposition party candidate’s victory. That is, would the ruling party have lost if one of the trailing candidates had opted not to run? Second, there were charges following the election that the Kuomintang misled people into believing their candidate was still leading in the polls, when he was really running third, and this misinformation led people to vote differently than they would have otherwise, possibly giving the election to the opposition party candidate. We examine the validity of this claim by measuring the degree to which strategic voting could have influenced the outcome. Third, to understand the underlying dimensions of the electoral competition in Taiwan and to understand each candidate’s electoral support, we run a multivariate statistical model to study how strategic voting, candidate personalities, party identification, and issues influenced respondents’ vote choices. Finally, we discuss the effects of election polling data on election outcomes.