How campaigns promote the legitimacy of elections

Why do people see elections as fair or unfair? In prior accounts, evaluations of the election depend on people's candidate preferences, where supporters of the winning candidate tend to call the election fair while those on the losing side feel it was unfair. I argue that perceptions of election fairness reflect not just the election outcome, but also the campaign process. Using a set of multilevel models and data from the 1996–2004 American National Election Studies, I explore the consequences of campaign experiences in shaping people's evaluations of the fairness of a presidential election. I find that as campaign competition increases, people are less likely to translate their feelings about the candidates into their evaluations of the election. Rather than alienating citizens, competitive campaigns mitigate the effects of prior preferences in a way that promotes the legitimacy of elections.     

The impact of campaign expenditures on political competition in the French legislative elections of 1993

We use regression analysis to estimate the effect that campaign money had on the votes of challengers and incumbents in the 1993 elections to the French legislative assembly. Incumbent candidates can at best expect to win 1.01% of the popular vote for each extra franc they spend per registered voter in their district. Challengers can expect to win at least twice as much as this. Simulations show that if campaign spending ceilings were halved, incumbents would have gained an extra ten percent of the popular vote over their closest challenging rivals. The regression analysis also suggests that voters react negatively to candidates who rely heavily on their own money for their outlays and reward candidates who rely on contributions from private individuals. These results suggest that campaign spending ceilings may inhibit political competition, and that voters may resist a candidate who relies on narrow sources of funding.     

The Effect of Political Competition on Democratic Accountability

Representing uncompetitive, homogeneous constituencies is increasingly the norm for American legislators. Extensive research has investigated how competition affects the way representatives respond to their constituents’ policy preferences. This paper explores competition’s effect on the other side of representation, how constituents respond to their legislators’ policy record. Combining multiple measures of state competitiveness with large-N survey data, I demonstrate that competition enhances democratic accountability. Voters in competitive states are more interested in politics, more aware of the policy positions their U.S. senators have taken, and more likely to hold them accountable for those positions at election time. Robustness checks show that these effects are not due to the intensity of campaigning in a state: general competition, not particular campaign activities, drives citizens’ response. The recent increase in uncompetitive constituencies has likely lessened the degree to which legislators are held accountable for their actions in office.     

How to change other people's institutions: discursive entrepreneurship and the boundary object of competition/competitiveness in the German banking sector

Abstract

The paper explores recent public debates about the structure of the financial system in Germany. It pays particular attention to their symbolic-strategic dimension, that is, to attempts by several institutional entrepreneurs to reformulate the criteria of organizational legitimacy, concentrating on the sense-making and legitimization processes involved in institutional persistence or change. The paper discourse-analyses a campaign by institutional entrepreneurs – mainly representatives of commercial banks – who attempted to homogenize the criteria of organizational legitimacy in the German banking sector by questioning the fundamentals of the three-pillar system and the non-commercial banks. Institutional entrepreneurs are understood as discursive entrepreneurs whose actions refer to institutionalized generalizations of value. In the case of the financial sector in Germany, it was the generalized value of competition/competitiveness that served as a discursive device to legitimize the attempts of commercial banks to alter the institutional structure.     

Impact of American Political Marketing on Israeli Society

The extensive literature examining the impact of American campaign styles in other countries generally attributes various political changes to the presence of American professionals and imported campaign techniques. Yet foreign professionals working on international campaigns may have more or less influence, and there is little systematic understanding of the factors that contribute to their actual influence over the local campaign. This paper examines the Israeli case as an example of strong penetration of American campaign professionals and techniques and analyzes the factors that contributed to their relatively high level of influence. Following this, a framework is proposed for assessing when imported American professionals and/or styles are likely to have a strong or weak influence on a campaign, based on factors leading to easy adoption or requiring more extensive adaptation. The study finds that in Israel, endogenous factors including social, political, cultural, and economic evolution contributed to the easy adoption of American campaign practices, creating a welcoming environment for American professionals. Thus, the major changes in campaigns often attributed to Americanization in other countries may be due at least in part to organic social, economic, and cultural changes of that society.     

Issue Convergence in Presidential Campaigns

This effort seeks to expand our understanding of the supply-side of the campaign process by investigating how candidate competition for agenda control affects occurrences of issue convergence (the discussion of the same issues by competing candidates) in campaigns for the presidency. More specifically, I integrate hypotheses suggested by extant literature into a framework that captures the factors that motivate presidential candidates selection of issues and the factors that affect their decisions to address issues also discussed by their opponents. These hypotheses are tested with duration analysis and data gathered from all available campaign advertisements produced by candidates competing in the 1976 through 1996 presidential elections. The results indicate that occurrences of issue convergences are quite frequent in presidential campaigns and that candidates decisions to address the same issues are affected by an issues saliency and partisan ownership, as well by changes in the campaign environment.     

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.     

Manifesto functions: How party candidates view and use their party's central policy document

Electoral manifestos play a crucial role in visions of party democracy and political science analyses of party competition. While research has focused on the contents of manifestos, we know much less about how parties produce manifestos and the roles they take in campaigns. This paper identifies three campaign-related functions of manifestos: they provide a compendium of valid party positions, streamline the campaign, and are used as campaign material. Based on the characteristics of the candidates, the parties and the campaign, the paper then derives expectations of how party candidates may differ in attributing importance to their party's manifesto. Based on a candidate survey after the 2013 Austrian general election, the paper shows that the key user-group of parliamentary candidates considers manifestos generally important and useful documents. Candidates' policy-centred campaigning and left–right distance from their own party are important in explaining individual differences. While the manifesto's service functions of providing a summary of valid party positions for the candidates and as a campaign means to be handed out to voters are widely appreciated, campaign streamlining is more divisive when it results in constraining candidates.     

How do candidates spend their money? Objects of campaign spending and the effectiveness of diversification

We present a novel approach to the study of campaign effectiveness using disaggregated spending returns from the 2007 Irish general election. While previous studies have focused on overall levels of expenditure as a predictor of electoral success, we consider the types of activities on which candidates spent money and the overall diversification of candidates’ campaign expenditure as predictors of electoral success. We offer a replicable framework for the measurement of campaign diversification as well as for the evaluation of its effects on electoral performance. We examine how factors such as campaign expenditure and candidates’ incumbency status condition the effects of campaign diversification. It is shown that diversification is only related to electoral success when campaigns are well-financed.     

The Life Cycle of Party Manifestos: The Austrian Case

Election manifestos are one of the most prominent sources of data for the study of party politics and government. Yet the processes of manifesto production, enactment, and public reception are not very well understood. This article attempts to narrow this knowledge gap by conducting a first investigation into the ‘life cycle’ of election manifestos from the drafting stage to their use in the campaign and post-election periods. Specifically, it investigates the Austrian case between 1945 and 2008 (with special emphasis on the 1990s and 2000s), employing a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data. While the research is thus mostly exploratory, it develops systematic expectations about variation between parties according to their ideology, organisation, government status, and characteristics of their electorates across the stages of the manifesto life cycle. Of those factors, organisational characteristics and status as government or opposition parties were found to be relevant.     

Strategic campaigning, closeness, and voter mobilization in U.S. Presidential elections

The scholarly literature on voter mobilization is ambivalent regarding the effects of closeness on turnout. Economic analyses of turnout (i.e. the classic calculus of voting) contend that as elections become closer, voters perceive their participation as more valuable because there is a greater chance that they will cast the deciding vote. Other work argues that voters do not take closeness into account because the probability that their vote uniquely changes the outcome of an election is quite small even in close elections. Still, this second perspective maintains that closeness may increase turnout because elites distribute campaign resources to places where election results could be affected by mobilizing additional supporters. While the latter perspective is theoretically well-developed, empirical support for the notion that elite activity (rather than citizen perceptions) connects closeness and turnout is limited. Using improved measures of closeness and campaign activities, we test for citizen perception and elite mobilization effects on turnout in the context of U.S. Presidential elections. Results show that while closeness has no direct effect on turnout, elites indeed target campaign activities on close states and the asymmetric distribution of resources across states results in higher turnout in battleground states.     

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.     

The French presidential election of 24 April–8 May and the general election of 5–12 June 1988

The French presidential and legislative elections of 1988 and their aftermath provided a full test of the constitutional arrangements of the Fifth Republic. This article describes the tactical considerations behind President Mitterrand's own campaign for re-election and behind the manoeuvrings of the various candidates on the right. It reports on the conduct and outcome of the presidential campaign and on the decision to move on to an immediate dissolution of the National Assembly. The campaign and the paradoxical outcome of the return to scrutin à deux tours are fully examined.     

Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa

This article draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in 22 public opinion surveys in 10 countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical methodology, we find that these shifts are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the salience of occupational and class identities. Our findings lend support to situational theories of social identification and are consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Africa for instrumental reasons: because they are useful in the competition for political power.     

Testing a Predictive Model of Voter Behavior on the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

Utilizing a predictive model of voter behavior, this study identified the motivations behind a sample of voters who cast a ballot for George W. Bush and AI Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign. The motivations of the voters were differentiated on the basis of the “value” they sought in a president. In other words, just as companies in the “commercial marketplace” have to create value to attract customers, so does a candidate in the “political marketplace” who is seeking to carve out a niche for himself that separates him from his competition. Pairwise discriminant analysis is used to identify the motivations behind the choice behavior of voters at both the candidate and party level. The results reveal the complimentary roles that the political party and each candidate's campaign organization played in their respective marketing strategies.     

A rational choice model of citizen participation in high and low commitment electoral activities

Weisberg and Grofman (1981) propose a rational choice model of voter turnout which they test with data from the 1976 Presidential election. We extend and generalize that model to cover a wide variety of forms of electoral participation including working on a campaign, wearing campaign buttons, and talking to others about the campaign. We find that voters who see a difference between the candidates, with one candidate positively evaluated and the other negatively, are roughly twice as likely to participate in high involvement electoral activities as are those who are alienated from or indifferent to the candidates.     

One for the Record - the 1997 Storting Election

Norwegian politics remains in a turbulent and volatile state. The 1997 Storting election became a record-breaking election where two parties, the Christian Peoples Party and the Progress Party, achieved their best ever results. The Conservative Party experienced the worst result in the party's more than hundred years' history. The Labor Party had its second worst election since the 1930s, while the Center party halved its number of voters and lost two thirds of their MPs compared to the previous election. The election campaign played a decisive role in this outcome. More than half of the voters decided which party to vote for during the campaign. Lack of commitment, rather than the parties' ability to create a positive interest in the election, seems to have caused the large shifts in support for the parties and the record-high share of voters who decided during the campaign. 43 percent of the voters changed party preference from 1993 to 1997. If we exclude non-voters, 33 percent switched party. The main issues of the campaign were health and eldercare. Although these issues dominated in all party groups, we find clear evidence of "issue ownership," where specific parties attract voters with particular agendas and issue priorities. The Labor Party government stepped down after the election and was replaced by a centrist government led by Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik. The new government is one of the weakest minority governments in Norwegian history and is only supported by 42 of the 165 Storting members.     

Cultivating Campaign Managers: A Discussion Regarding the Creation and Implementation of a Campaign Management Course

When approached about working with colleagues to develop a new course revolving around the inner-workings of a political campaign, one thing was obvious to me: We had to give the course the unique element of making it as closely mimic real-world campaign activities as possible. If we were going to attempt to actually prepare students for work on a political campaign, they would have to participate in activities focusing on the practical application of theoretical information. As such, I designed a section of this course where students were matched with a partner and given the task of running a mock political campaign. Students were presented with a series of activities to complete in their role as campaign managers. This article outlines the way the course was set up, explains the activities used in the course, discusses the success of the course based on observation and survey data, and suggests improvements for the future.     

How to Win the UK Referendum on the European Constitution

Opinion polls suggest the UK Government faces an uphill task in winning the forthcoming referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. This article provides a detailed analysis of the factors that are likely to decide the referendum outcome. Using recent survey data, we analyze the factors that influence individual-level support for the Constitutional Treaty. These results show that it is not only general attitudes towards European integration which are likely to play an important role, but also partisanship and satisfaction with the government. Given the low levels of information about the Constitution and the large number of undecided voters, the campaign itself will be crucial to the outcome. We argue that while information alone will not necessarily persuade voters, a successful campaign strategy by the yes-camp could make a decisive difference by motivating and informing voters, as well as setting the agenda for the debate.     

The undecided voters and the economy: Campaign heterogeneity in the 2005 British general election

Research and conventional wisdom suggest that undecided voters are especially prone to campaign persuasion. Little has been done, however, in the way of uncovering the decision pathways followed by these voters. In this paper we seek to assess the undecided voters’ alleged campaign susceptibility and, most importantly, to explore which campaign considerations inform their final voting decisions. Our central finding is that their behaviour is driven to a larger extent by economic performance and less by leadership or other valence evaluations. This finding has important implications for parties’ campaign strategies in an era where the ranks of undecided voters are steadily expanding from one election to the other.