Politics in 140 Characters or Less: Campaign Communication,Network Interaction,and Political Participation on Twitter

The methods by which politicians and policy makers communicate with the public are constantly adapting to the ever-changing media environment. As part of this changing landscape, this study considers the case of Twitter. Specifically, the authors conduct a survey of political Twitter users, in order to understand their use of the medium and their political behaviors within it. Results indicate that political Twitter users are more interested in and engaged in politics in general and less trusting of the mainstream media. Moreover, the study investigates the extent to which followers of a campaign may affect its overall influence in the Twitterverse.     

Congressional Activism in the Foreign Policy Arena: A Case Study of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

This article analyzes congressional activism during an international crisis. Using the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a case, this study explores executive–congressional relations during a time when immediate policy responses are needed. A content analysis of policy statements made during committees, on the House floor, and on the Senate floor is used to investigate the specific policy ideas proposed by members of Congress. The models presented pay particular attention to the actions of Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) members, in relation to other more common predictors of congressional activism. In addition to the results for CBC members, other conclusions indicate that foreign policy leaders in Congress are international affairs policy experts without serious concerns of being defeated in their next election.     

Empowering the Party-Crasher: Donald J. Trump,the First 2016 GOP Presidential Debate,and the Twitter Marketplace for Political Campaigns

This article argues that an important political marketplace of keywords expands in social media around campaign events such as a debate; that rhetorical efforts to define the situation in which a campaign event occurs are met in this marketplace by user responses that more or less echo the keywords, thereby enhancing or diminishing the political power of their “caller” or speaker; and that social media monitoring platforms can enhance our understanding of public opinion influence competitions among candidates through the careful selection, tabulation, and inspection of words and phrases being voiced. In the case at hand, an analysis of Twitter volume data and a reading of a sample of 1200 tweets between July 30 and August 15, 2015, a period enveloping the first 2016 Republican presidential candidate debate on August 6, 2015, helps us understand how Donald J. Trump escaped political punishment from party and media elites for subverting Republican and U.S. norms of candidate behavior. Elite voices greatly disapproved of Trump’s debate performance and conduct, a traditional augury of declining public support. But the presence of social media voices enhanced Trump’s capacity to succeed with an insurgent marketing strategy, one he would continue into his election as president fifteen months later. Specifically, comparatively high user volume on a debate-oriented section of Twitter (i.e., posts with the hashtag #GOPDebate) for Trump’s name, slogan, and Twitter address, and for such advantageous keywords as “political correctness,” “Megyn Kelly,” and “illegal immigration” relative to terms and phrases favoring other candidates and Republicans as a whole indicates the presence of heavy and active popular support for Trump. The contents of the corresponding tweet sample exhibit Twitter-savvy techniques and populist stances by which the Trump campaign solicited that support: celebrity feuding, callouts to legacy media allies, featured fan comments, a blunt vernacular, and confrontational branding. The contents also illustrate ways in which users manifested their support: from the aforementioned high keyword volume to imitative behavior and the supplying of evidence to verify Trump’s contested claims during the debate.     

Populism and Connectivism: An Analysis of the Sanders and Trump Nomination Campaigns

This paper is an analysis of the Trump and Sanders’ campaigns for the presidential nomination of their respective parties. It studies the structure of the relationship between the campaign and its supporters through communication on each candidate’s Facebook page. While both campaigns have been termed populist, we differentiate populism from connectivism and develop an account of a connective campaign as a species of connective action. Whereas populism is predicated on a singular people, connectivity involves the acceptance and recognition of difference as a resource for political activity. Whereas populism involves a hierarchical authority relationship, connectivity is based on a reciprocal authority relationship. Finally, populism articulates an anti-establishment demand while connective campaigns demand for citizens to have the capacity for consequential engagement with political life. The empirical results demonstrate that connectivism and populism are distinct in practice and that these attributes hang together as two separate concepts. Further, we find that Trump’s campaign communications emphasize populist themes, for Sanders such themes are limited and in the shadow of connectivism.     

Three Historical Perspectives on Trump,the Presidency,and American Populism

This article attempts to set up a conversation between certain aspects of the considerable scholarship on rhetoric and populist identity, on the one hand, and the historical perspectives on American populism provided by Michael Kazin; Christopher Lasch and a recent set of studies of the history of presidential rhetoric. It ends with tentative reflections on the effects of these historical perspectives for contemporary discussions.     

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.     

Pioneering New Politics or Rearranging the Deckchairs? The 2007 National Assembly for Wales Election and Results

This article analyses the campaign, results and outcome of the 2007 elections to the National Assembly for Wales. It discusses the constitutional and legislative framework of devolution in Wales, the election campaign and opinion polls. There is extensive analysis of the election results, the performance of each of the main and some of the smaller parties. Shifts in representation of women and ethnic minority AMs and departures and new arrivals are covered. There is discussion of changes in electoral turnout and the proportionality of the outcome, which is low and has declined since 2003. The final substantive section deals with the complexities of the post-election coalition negotiations, while events in Wales are placed in the context of international experiences around the formation of coalition governments     

Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data

ABSTRACT

Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance—the statesman’s and the scientist’s. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.     

Retrospective and Prospective Performance Assessments during the 2004 Election Campaign: Tests of Mediation and News Media Priming

According to many theoretical accounts of the vote choice, distal determinants (e.g., party identification) influence proximal determinants (e.g., perceptions of candidates), which in turn shape candidate preferences. Yet almost no research on voting has formally tested such mediational hypotheses. Using national survey data collected between February and September of 2004, this paper begins by illustrating how to conduct such investigations. We explored whether public approval of President Bush’s handling of a series of specific national problems (e.g., the Iraq war) influenced overall assessments of his job performance and evaluations of his likely future performance versus John Kerry’s, which in turn shaped vote choices. The results are consistent with the claim of mediation and shed additional light on the impact of various issues on the 2004 election outcome. We also tested what we term the “dosage hypothesis,” derived from news media priming theory, which posits that changes in the amount of media coverage of an issue during the course of a campaign should precipitate changes in the weight citizens place on that issue when evaluating the president’s overall job performance, particularly among citizens most exposed to the news. Surprisingly, this analysis did not yield consistent support for the venerable dosage hypothesis, suggesting that the conditions under which priming occurs should be specified much more precisely in future work.

Introduction: Social Media,Political Marketing and the 2016 U.S. Election

This essay introduces the contributions of the volume “Social Media, Political Marketing and the 2016 U. S. Election.” Using a variety of methodological approaches, the authors investigate the communication strategies of the Democratic and Republican candidates for president together with the responses of their audience. Collectively, this research offers insights into how new communication technologies are changing both political marketing and the ways candidates and voters interact.     

One voter and two choices: The impact of electoral context on the 2011 UK referendum

There is a debate in the literature on referendum voting as to whether these occasions are opportunities for voters to express issue preferences in the absence of partisan politics or whether they simply serve as referendums on the current government. In part, this latter, second order account is assumed to be driven by the amount and content of media coverage, and hence information about the referendum, that is available to voters. In this paper, we address the second order question and demonstrate that holding elections concurrently both reduces the amount of media attention to the second order contest—the AV referendum in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland where national elections were held—and moderates media priming, thereby affecting the salient cues in the decision making of voters in those contexts.     

Negative Campaigning in Party-Controlled Communication Channels: Party Communication Strategies in Campaign Posters,Newspaper Advertisement,and Press Releases during the 2008 Austrian National Election Campaign

Politicians and people professionally involved in politics agree that negative campaigning is a frequently used campaign communication strategy by Austrian political parties. Yet, there is no empirical investigation of such claims. The present study examines party-controlled communication channels to identify the use of negative messaging strategies from a political actor's perspective. The data for this study come from a 6-week content analysis of campaign posters, newspaper advertisement and press releases of the 2008 Austrian National Elections. I examine the degree, source, target, and type of negativity. Results show that there are great differences in the degree and type of negativity between the three communication channels. Whereas in press releases all Austrian parties constantly engaged in going negative, campaign posters hardly contained any negative message. To a great extent negative campaign tactics are adjusted depending to whom the message is addressed to in the first place, the voter or the media. Concerning the source and target of negative appeals, results show that in particular, parties sitting in opposition employ negative campaigning. Yet, they are hardly ever the target of negative messages.     

Image repair in the aftermath of inaccurate polling: How the news media responded to getting it wrong in 1948 and 2016

The US presidential elections of 1948 and 2016 produced surprise outcomes when the predicted winners ended up losing the election. Using image repair theory, this article explains the strategies the media used to repair their image in light of predicting the wrong winner. Using a qualitative analysis of news coverage that immediately followed the 1948 and 2016 presidential elections, this study finds that the media utilized similar image repair strategies of offering explanations for poor information, highlighting the media’s good reporting, diminishing the harm caused by the inaccurate predictions, and justifying the inaccurate predictions of both elections. However, the media responses in 1948 and 2016 differed greatly in tone and in the utilization of a new attack strategy to deflect criticism of the media itself. These strategies suggest that media use of image restoration is limited because of the unique societal expectations placed on the press, and that the media’s inaccurate 2016 predictions and subsequent attack strategies may have been contributed to the heightened criticism of mainstream news.     

Resurgent Remain and a Rebooted Revolt on the Right: Exploring the 2019 European Parliament Elections in the United Kingdom

The 2019 European Parliament (EP) election took place against the backdrop of the vote for Brexit and the failure of Parliament to agree on a withdrawal agreement. Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party topped the poll and the pro‐Remain Liberal Democrats, which called for a second referendum on EU membership, returned from electoral obscurity to take second place, while other pro‐Remain parties similarly performed well. In sharp contrast, the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, recorded their lowest combined vote share since they became the main representatives of the two‐party system. In this article, we draw on aggregate‐level data to explore what happened at the 2019 EP election in Great Britain. Our evidence suggests Labour suffered from a ‘pincer movement’, losing support in its mainly white, working class ‘left behind’ heartlands but also in younger cosmopolitan areas where Labour had polled strongly at the 2017 general election. Support for the new Brexit Party increased more significantly in ‘left behind’ communities, which had given strong support to Leave at the 2016 referendum, suggesting that national populists capitalised on Labour’s woes. The Conservatives haemorrhaged support in affluent, older retirement areas but largely at the expense of the resurgent Liberal Democrats, with the latter surging in Remain areas and where the Conservatives are traditionally strong, though not in areas with younger electorates where the party made so much ground prior to the 2010–2015 coalition government. Lastly, turnout increased overall compared with 2014, but individuals living in Leave areas were less motivated to vote. Overall, our findings suggest that those living in Remain areas were more driven to express their discontent with the Brexit process and more inclined to support parties that offer a second referendum on Britain’s EU membership.     

Voting on Europe,again and again: Stability and change in the Irish experience with EU referendums

This article is about comparative voting behaviour in referendums on the EU and explores variation within one country rather than variations across countries. This enables us to control for broad national context while allowing variations in the immediate referendum context, in terms of campaign intensity and incumbency. It analyses voting behaviour in the many referendums that have taken place in Ireland. The major part of the analysis deals with the five referendums since 2001, as this allows the use of the same measurement of EU support and the use of post referendum surveys. Most attention is paid to attitude to the EU, party support and satisfaction with the incumbent government, reflecting the main debates in the literature on the issues and party cues. The relative importance of each is said to depend on contextual factors such as campaign intensity and economic strength. We find both party cues and issues matter consistently, and suggestive evidence that incumbency matters to the effectiveness of cues given by the two main pro-EU parties but the major finding is that variations in the factors driving voting behaviour in different Irish polls on Europe are slight and barely significant.     

President Obama on the ballot: Referendum voting and racial spillover in the 2014 midterm elections

The 2014 elections were widely viewed as a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama. Republicans ran against the incumbent president, and many view the Republican Party's victories in 2014 as a mass rejection of President Obama's policies. We argue that this account of the 2014 elections is incomplete. We advance the theory of racial spillover—that associating an attitude object with President Obama causes public opinion to polarize on the basis of racial attitudes—to explain both vote choice and referendum voting in the 2014 elections. In an analysis of the CCES and an original survey, we show that congressional vote choice was strongly racialized in 2014. We go on to show that perceptions of the election as a referendum on President Obama were also racialized, and that these perceptions mediated the link between racial animus and 2014 congressional vote choice. This represents the first study to show that racialized congressional evaluations continued into 2014 and we provide direct evidence that attitudes about President Obama mediated the effect of racial animus on congressional vote choice. We conclude by discussing the implications for referendum voting, racial spillover, and the 2014 midterm elections.     

An integrated perspective on the three potential sources of partisan bias: Malapportionment, turnout differences, and the geographic distribution of party vote shares

Partisan bias refers to an asymmetry in the way party vote share is translated into seats, i.e., a situation where some parties are able to win a given share of seats with a lesser (share of the) vote than is true for other parties. Any districted system is potentially subject to partisan biases. We show that there are three potential sources of partisan bias: (1) differences in the nature of the vote shares of the winning candidates of different parties that give rise to differences in the proportion of each party's votes that come to be ‘wasted’—differences which arise because of the nature of the geographic distribution of partisan support; (2) turnout rate differences across districts that are linked to the partisan vote shares in those districts, such that certain parties are more likely to have ‘cheap seats’ vis-à-vis turnout; and (3) malapportionment. In the context of two-party competition over single-member districts we provide a simple formulation to calculate the independent effect of each of these three factors. We illustrate our analysis with a calculation of the magnitude and direction of effects of the three determinants of partisan bias in elections to the US House and the US Senate in 1984, 1986 and 1988; then we consider how to extend the approach to a system with a mix of single- and multi-member districts or to a weighted voting system such as the US electoral college. We then apply the method to calculate the nature and sources of partisan bias in the 1984 and 1988 US presidential elections.