Campaign activities and state election outcomes

This research first clusters campaign activities in state legislative elections into five empirically justified and conceptually meaningful clusters: direct attempts to persuade voters, obtaining the support of other elites, attempts to increase turnout, seeking endorsements from other political officials, and fund raising. Indices created from these clusters are then compared to the situational factors of incumbency and competition as predictors of election outcomes. Data are surveys of candidates for the Louisiana legislature in which they were asked about the conduct of their campaigns and their relative emphasis on various activities. Incumbency was by far the best predictor of what percentage of the vote a candidate obtained, and in open seat contests, expenditures and competition best predicted outcome. Overall, the campaign activities had very little relationship to outcome when controlling for situational factors. Variations occurred between the House and Senate races with implications for challengers' strategies and campaign financing.     

Vote Oswego: Developing and Assessing the Campaign-as-Course Model

College campuses have taken on increased responsibility for mobilizing young voters. Despite the discipline’s commitment to civic engagement, political science departments play a minimal role in this programming. This article outlines a course structure—including learning objectives, course outline, and assessments—that treats a campus-wide voter mobilization drive as the basis of an applied political science course. Transforming a campus voter mobilization program into a political science practicum offers advanced skill-building for students seeking political careers and links learning objectives to real world activities. Participants report gains in both knowledge of campaigns and grassroots campaign skills. We argue this type of course particularly benefits students attending colleges and universities in geographic areas that receive little attention from political campaigns as well as those students for whom the traditional route of gaining political experience—an unpaid, off-campus internship—is impractical or even impossible.     

The Effects of Campaign Participation on Political Attitudes

Participatory democratic theorists have long claimed that political participation improves citizens and helps to integrate them into the political community. In recent years political participation has been advocated as a way of reducing alienation, particularly among the young. This experimental study assesses the effects of campaign participation on the attitudes and opinions of a group of young people, particularly attitudes of alienation. Employing Q methodology, this study examines the attitudinal impact of campaign participation on 57 subjects through the use of precampaign and postcampaign Q sorts. By comparing the results with a control group it was determined that campaign participation does result in greater attitudinal shift for participants than for nonparticipants; however, the changes that occurred resulted in shifts away from alienation (as democratic theorists predict) and shifts in the direction of greater alienation (contrary to predictions).     

Culture,Institutions and Campaign Effects: Explaining the Outcome of Malta's EU Accession Referendum

This survey examines the background to and the campaign preceding Malta's EU accession referendum. The result of the referendum, which was held on 8 March 2003, and which was the first of the EU accession referendums of 2003, was a 53.65% vote in support of membership, on a turnout of close to 91%. Explaining both the relatively low support for EU accession and the high turnout on referendum day involves weighing up the relative impact of distinctive features of Malta's political culture and institutional framework against more immediate campaign effects. While the conclusion is that the high turnout in the Maltese EU accession referendum can be traced to Malta's political culture, the relatively low but positive vote in favour of membership can only be fully understood by focusing on a range of factors, including campaign-related factors, such as the credibility of the arguments presented by the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps and the balance of resources available. The most important factor explaining the result of the Maltese referendum are, however, the cues provided by the political parties prior to and over the course of the referendum campaign.     

Understanding Campaign Strategy

SUMMARY

The role of professional political consultants in campaigns is not very well understood, at least from a theoretical perspective. As a result, we know very little about how campaign strategy is developed. This article is an attempt to think theoretically about how professional campaign operatives craft strategies for candidates. It begins with a review of previous research on consultants and campaign strategy. That work helps lay a foundation for a theory of professional campaign activity that focuses on the development of campaign strategy. I then turn to campaign professionals themselves. Based on interviews with numerous consultants and other campaign operatives, I identify common approaches to building strategy within campaigns. Finally, I explain the notion of ‘deliberate priming,’ a theoretical understanding of professionally run campaigns that emerges from the consultant interviews and previous scholarship in this field.     

Primed by the Euro: The Impact of a Referendum Campaign on Public Opinion and Evaluations of Government and Political Leaders

The premise of political priming is that public evaluations of political leaders are made on the basis of issues that are on the top of citizens' minds. This study investigated the impact of a national referendum campaign about a European integration issue on the evaluation of the incumbent government, the prime minister, and the opposition leaders. Drawing on a content analysis of news media and a two-wave panel survey, the results showed that as the topic of the referendum (the introduction of the euro) became more visible in the media during the campaign the importance of the euro issue for formulating general evaluations of political leaders increased. The incumbent government that was seen to handle the referendum poorly was penalized by the referendum. Exposure to news media outlets that covered the referendum extensively and offered negative evaluations of political leaders boosted the decline in the overall performance rating of political leaders by politically less involved respondents. These results stress the necessity of considering the campaign and the specific content of the media to understand fluctuations in public opinion during a referendum campaign. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of a referendum campaign for political leaders.     

The transnational dimension of the election

Direct elections to the European Parliament have a transnational as well as a national dimension. Up to the present, the national dimension clearly dominates, however. In the course of the 1984 election campaign, issues concerning the structure, functioning and development perspectives of the European Community's political system generally were of minor importance. The same can be stated for transnational actors and their activities. In spite of the various campaign activities of the Commission of the EC, the European Parliament with its political groups and the European party federations, the dominant part of the campaign was played by national actors. It is arguable that the 1984 election, compared to 1979, even saw an actual ‘renationalization’ of politics, a further diminution of the already modest importance of the transnational dimension.     

U.S. Congressional Campaign Communications in an Internet Age

New technologies – with perhaps the most notable being radio and television – often change the face of political campaigns. The Internet, and particularly campaign websites with their concomitant technologies (e.g. interactive and multimedia features), has evolved at a faster rate than any other prior innovation. This raises a critical question: have website technologies altered how congressional candidates campaign? We address this question with a novel dataset from 2008. Not only do we chart technological change on sites over the course of the campaign but we also explore how and when candidates use certain technologies. We discover two critical and, to our knowledge, novel points. First, congressional candidates use these technologies to a much lesser extent than one may suspect. Second, their scant usage is driven by how certain technologies limit control of the candidate's message, the candidate's status in the race and other key variables such as the employment of campaign consultants. In sum, the Web 2.0 era (which began around 2008) does not appear to have dramatically altered congressional campaigns.     

Campaign styles: Persistency in campaign resource allocation

How do candidates allocate their campaign resources and when do they change their allocations? Using data of over 3.5 million expenditure items submitted by candidates who ran for House seats between 2004 through 2014, we provide a detailed picture of how candidates allocate their limited resources among different categories of activities. Although different candidates running in the same race allocated their campaign resource differently, in the aggregate, monthly expenditure patterns over the course of the campaign period across six election cycles are similar. Also, from one cycle to the next, candidates rarely changed their campaign resource allocations, even when they face varying qualities of challengers, different sets of voters due to redistricting, and increases in outside spending after Citizens United. This suggests that candidates’ expenditure decisions are sticky across election cycles. We show additional evidence of this persistency by documenting repeated contractual relationship with the same consultants and campaign vendors by campaigns.     

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.     

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.     

Rough Terrain: Spatial Variation in Campaign Contributing and Volunteerism

We examine spatial patterns of mass political participation in the form of volunteering and donating to a major statewide election campaign. While these forms of participation are predictably associated with the political and socioeconomic characteristics of the precincts in which the participants reside, we find that these statistical relationships are spatially nonstationary. High-income neighborhoods, for example, are associated with stronger effects on participation at some locations more than at others. By using geographically weighted regression (GWR) to specify local regression parameters, we are able to capture the heterogeneity of contextual processes that generate the geographically uneven flow of volunteers and contributors into a political campaign. Since spatial nonstationarity may well be a rule rather than an exception in the study of many political phenomena, social scientific analyses should be mindful that relationships may vary by location.     

论护国运动中的联邦主义

在护国军政府中,无论是欧事研究会,还是进步党和西南地方实力派,都有联邦主义诉求,这使得护国运动具有强烈的联邦主义色彩。联邦主义的出现,既有其一定的思想基础,又有浓厚的工具主义色彩。随着护国运动的结束,联邦主义逐渐沉寂。20世纪20年代初,在中国空前分裂的特殊格局下,联邦主义又演变为声势浩大的联省自治思潮和运动。     

Political Participation and Civic Courage: The Negative Effect of Transparency on Making Small Campaign Contributions

This study assesses whether public disclosure of campaign contributions affects citizens’ willingness to give money to candidates. In the American states, campaign finance laws require disclosure of private information for contributors at relatively low thresholds ranging from $1 to $300. The Internet has made it relatively easy to publicize such information in a way that changes the social context for political participation. Drawing on social influence theory, the analysis suggests that citizens are sensitive to divulging private information, especially those who are surrounded by people with different political views. Using experimental data from the 2011 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, it demonstrates how individuals refrain from making small campaign contributions or reduce their donations to avoid disclosing their identities. The conclusion discusses the implications of transparency laws for political participation, especially for small donors.     

Campaign Learning and Vote Determinants

How campaigns shape voters' decisions is central to the study of political behavior. The basic conclusion is simple: campaigns matter. While we know who campaigns influence, there is no clear empirical evidence of why or how campaigns matter. This comes from two things. First, despite different theories about campaigns, the existing studies measure the campaign as a function of time. Second, these studies ignore the individual-level psychological mediators of these effects. We know that there are differences across time during a campaign, but we do not know how or why. In this article I suggest that campaigns work by altering voters' uncertainty about the candidates and combine aggregate and individual-level data using a hierarchical logit estimated via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. I find that voters change how they weigh their attitudes during the campaign because of changes in their uncertainty about the candidates.     

Campaign Contributions Facilitate Access to Congressional Officials: A Randomized Field Experiment

Concern that donations to political campaigns secure preferential treatment from policy makers has long occupied judges, scholars, and the public. However, the effects of contributions on policy makers’ behavior are notoriously difficult to assess. We present the first randomized field experiment on the topic. The experiment focuses on whether contributions facilitate access to influential policy makers. In the experiment, a political organization attempted to schedule meetings between 191 congressional offices and the organization's members in their districts who were campaign donors. However, the organization randomly assigned whether it revealed to congressional offices that prospective attendees had contributed to campaigns. When informed prospective attendees were political donors, senior policy makers made themselves available between three and four times more often. These findings underscore concerns about the Supreme Court's recent decisions deregulating campaign finance.     

Campaign Advertising and Democratic Citizenship

Concern about the state of American democracy is a staple of political science and popular commentary. Critics warn that levels of citizen participation and political knowledge are disturbingly low and that seemingly ubiquitous political advertising is contributing to the problem. We argue that political advertising is rife with both informational and emotional content and actually contributes to a more informed, more engaged, and more participatory citizenry. With detailed advertising data from the 2000 election, we show that exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately are more likely to vote. Importantly, these effects are concentrated among those citizens who need it most: those with the lowest pre-existing levels of political information.     

WASPI's Is (Mostly) a Campaign for Inequality

Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) has mounted a vociferous campaign for full compensation to be given to ‘1950s women’ who, it argues, have suffered severe financial hardship as a result of the rise in their state pension age from age 60. That campaign has gained significant political traction, with much sympathy expressed for the plight of those affected and acceptance (most notably by the Scottish National Party and the Labour Party) that some form of compensation is urgently needed. But WASPI fails to acknowledge the rise in the state pension age's roots in the fight for women's equality, disregards the fact that the problems experienced by this cohort as they near retirement are faced by both women and men and glosses over the fact that the increase in pension age above 65 applies to both genders equally. Its campaign obscures deeper and more important issues in old‐age income replacement.     

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.     

How Russia's Internet Research Agency Built its Disinformation Campaign

In this article we analyse features of the information influence operations run by the St. Petersburg based Internet Research Agency, targeted at Europe. Informed by publicly available ‘open source’ data, the analysis delineates three key tactics that underpinned their disinformation campaign: account buying; ‘follower fishing’; and narrative switching. Both individually and collectively these were designed to build the reach, impact and influence of the ideologically loaded messages that social media account operators authored and amplified. The particular value of the analysis is that whilst a lot of recent public and political attention has focussed upon Kremlin backed disinformation in respect of the 2016 United States presidential election, far less work has addressed their European activities.