The Benefits of Experimental Methods for the Study of Campaign Effects

Researchers rely heavily on observational designs to study the effects of political campaigns. In doing so, scholars often overlook serious threats to causal inference that bedevil their research designs. The strategic nature of campaigns leads to serious selection biases in voter exposure to campaign stimuli and, ultimately, generates biased estimates of campaign effects. Standard approaches to establishing causal effects in observational research, such as the collection of panel data and the inclusion of covariates, are often inadequate. In contrast, experimental approaches offer researchers a more promising way to estimate accurately the causal effects of campaigns. In this essay, I discuss the recent renaissance of experimental research in the study of campaigns and illustrate how scholars can use lab, field, and survey experiments to good effect. When experimental methods are not feasible, studies of campaign effects would benefit from paying better attention to the causal identification strategy. In closing, I discuss how the logic of experimentation can be applied to some observational settings.     

Issue Frame Ownership: The Partisan Roots of Campaign Rhetoric

Campaigns can shape vote choice decisions by effectively framing issues for voters. I examine how campaigns do this by studying the content of issues appeals in television advertisements from U.S. House and Senate candidates. The use of issue frames is partisan. The two parties develop their own distinct rhetorical strategies on particular issues, showing that each party owns particular issue frames. In addition, campaign messages are sensitive to the partisanship of voters. Campaigns are more likely to use conservative frames in Republican-leaning districts and liberal frames in Democratic-leaning districts. Models of campaign strategy should incorporate not just what issues are discussed, but also the rhetorical choices campaigns make to address these issues.     

Ethnic politics and election campaigns in contemporary Africa: evidence from Ghana and Kenya

Why do some political parties in new democracies base their campaigns on promises of national public goods while others do not? Parties in new democracies often eschew programmatic policy proposals in favour of appealing to voters’ ethnic identities, distributing non-programmatic benefits, or emphasizing the personalities of their candidates. However, this is not universally the case. This article examines recent campaign strategies in two nascent democracies in Africa: Ghana and Kenya. The findings suggest that programmatic campaigning is much more common than is assumed, but that parties have different preferences for how much programmatic content they include in their campaigns. The article argues that differences in campaign strategies are largely due to differences in the composition of ethnic support for competing parties. Parties that draw a majority of their support from a single large ethnic group are more likely to develop campaign strategies based on programmatic, policy-based appeals in the form of specific proposals for national public goods than are parties with a more diverse ethnic base of supporters. I argue that these appeals serve as a pre-election commitment to counteract fears among the electorate of domination by the large ethnic core of the party.     

The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

The Dynamics of the Demobilization of the Protest Campaign in Assam

This study highlights the role that critical events play in the demobilization of protest campaigns. Social movement scholars suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of polarization within the campaign or the cooptation of the campaign leaders. I offer critical events as an alternative causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns in ethnically divided societies are particularly combustible, as they have the potential to trigger unintended or unorchestrated communal violence. When such violence occurs, elite strategies change, mass support declines, and the campaign demobilizes. An empirical investigation of the dynamics of the demobilization phase of the anti-foreigner protest campaign in Assam, India, between 1979 and 1985 confirms this argument. A single group analysis is conducted to compare the dynamics of the campaign before and after the communal violence by using time series event data collected from The Indian Express, a national newspaper. The study has wider implications for the literature on collective action, as it illuminates the dynamic and complex nature of protest campaigns.     

Issue Frames and the Political Outcomes of Transnational Campaigns: A Comparison of the Jubilee 2000 Movement and the Currency Transaction Tax Campaign

Since the end of the Cold War, a large number of transnational advocacy networks (TANs) have launched campaigns focusing on a number of different global issues. Some of these campaigns have been quite successful in influencing global public policy, while others have not. What accounts for differences in TANs' ability to shape the global policy process? How can we explain the variation in TAN campaign outcomes? To answer these questions, I draw on the concept of framing, which has been used to explain social movement mobilisation and outcomes, and apply it to two TAN campaigns that have had different outcomes: Jubilee 2000 and the Currency Transaction Tax campaign. I argue that effective framing strategies, i.e. the use of issue frames that resonate with international norms and values and provide compelling analyses and policy proposals, is one explanation for the variation in the outcomes of these two TAN campaigns.     

French defence reforms after Kosovo: On track or derailed?

How well prepared has France been politically for the operational implications of its efforts to build a military instrument designed for extra‐territorial interventions such as that conducted by NATO in Yugoslavia in 1999? Did the prolonged bombing campaign and the question of deploying ground troops provoke severe criticism and controversies? This article assesses the French Kosovo debate both in the political centre and the broader elite public. The analysis finds that the new French military instrument receives solid backing from key policymakers who now race to claim parenthood of the military reform programme. The utility of a new military instrument was at one stage developing into a major concern to the elite public. However, an engineered anti‐American agenda hijacked the debate, failed to address military issues, and ultimately could not mobilize the elite public. The conclusion outlines that an energized political centre has an opportunity to press ahead with military reforms but also points out that the relationship between France, Europe, and NATO requires careful political management.     

Osirak and the Counter-Proliferation Puzzle

This article focuses on the efforts made by Israel to stymie Iraq's nuclear program from 1974 to 1981. It argues that to fully understand the effects of Israel's campaign, its nonmilitary components need to be addressed, rather than focusing chiefly on the 1981 bombing of the Osirak reactor. While existing views hold that the bombing was counterproductive, this study finds Israel's overall campaign to have been a sophisticated and effective effort at curtailing Saddam Hussein's program. The campaign's main achievement was in buying time that allowed external events to take place, building towards the eventual collapse of Saddam's nuclear program. While Israel's campaign demonstrates that counterproliferation can work, there are instances where it can be highly counterproductive. Buying time can also be achieved without the use of force, through coercive means, as demonstrated by the Iranian case over the previous decade. However, various gradations of military intervention remain an important tool for preventing nuclear proliferation, as demonstrated by the cases of Osirak and the 2007 destruction of the Syrian nuclear reactor in al-Kibar.     

Presence to Press: How Campaigns EarnLocal Media

Today’s campaigns have ample resources with which to influence the media, while plummeting revenue, readership, and reporting staffs make local newspapers more vulnerable than ever. This imbalance raises an important question: if a campaign invests more resources in an area, can it earn positive media coverage? In this article, I propose a strategic relationship between campaigns and local media. Newspapers offer campaigns credibility and exposure, while campaigns offer local newspapers easy-to-report stories that will appeal to their readers. Campaign messages are more impactful when communicated through the local press, so campaigns will try to influence local news coverage (when they have the resources to do so) by establishing a local presence. When newspapers are vulnerable, they should be more likely to accept campaign prompting and provide campaigns with positive earned media. I employ an original data set of newspaper content and campaign investment from the 2004 and 2008 elections. I utilize a within-state matched-pairs design of newspapers from the state of Florida and a detailed content analysis of stories from 21 randomly selected days from each election cycle. I find that regional campaign presence generates positive earned media, but only in smaller newspapers. This article contributes to the fields of campaign and media effects by demonstrating how campaigns’ calculated decisions influence the construction of local political news. It is the first study to describe the connection between the voter contact and campaigns’ earned local media strategy.     

Presidential Campaigns and the Knowledge Gap

The knowledge gap hypothesis holds that when new information enters a social system via a mass media campaign, it is likely to exacerbate underlying inequalities in previously held information. Specifically, while people from all strata may learn new information as a result of a mass media campaign, those with higher levels of education are likely to learn more than those with low levels of education, and the informational gap between the two groups will expand. Though this hypothesis has received widespread attention in other disciplines, it has attracted relatively little attention in political science. Using data from the National Election Studies, this article investigates how well the knowledge gap hypothesis describes information acquisition in presidential campaigns from 1976 to 1996. The results of the analysis show that knowledge gaps do not always grow over the course of presidential campaigns and that some events, such as debates, may actually reduce the level of information inequality in the electorate.     

The Myths of Data-Driven Campaigning

Campaigns’ ability to use data and analytics to make informed decisions about the strategies and tactics they deploy is unparalleled, and also understudied. While much has been written about the possibilities of data driven campaigning, the on-the-ground realities are often much less precise and much less novel than journalistic coverage implies. This piece investigates the gap between the rhetoric of data driven campaigning and actual campaign practices, especially as it relates to how the 2016 Trump campaign compares to the 2016 Clinton campaign, other prior presidential campaigns, and down-ballot races in recent years. It focuses on the use of analytics in two channels in particular, social media and email, as those offer many opportunities for targeting and message testing. Ultimately, I argue that despite the great amount of journalistic attention paid to the Trump campaign’s novel use of data and analytics, their email campaign was significantly underpowered, while their use of Facebook analytics was comparable in quality and greater in quantity than other leaders in the field.     

Battlefield Responses to New Technologies: Views from the Ground on Unmanned Aircraft

How do individuals on the battlefield respond to the introduction of new technologies? How will unmanned and increasingly autonomous technologies be received by ground combat personnel? In this paper we explore tactical-level perceptions of one particular technology—armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—by conducting a survey experiment of ground fires controllers. Our findings reveal that these personnel have strong behavioral reactions to the introduction of unmanned technology. Especially in situations with high risk to ground troops, we find a strong preference for manned aircraft with implications for the future use of UAVs and human–machine relationships in war. These results suggest the need to incorporate behavioral variables into future studies of military adoption and innovation and indicate that the future adoption of unmanned systems may be just as much about the “warm fuzzy” of trust as confidence in unmanned capabilities.     

Invading Europe: The British army and its preparations for the Normandy campaign, 1942-44

The combat capability of 2nd British Army during the Normandy campaign has been much deprecated. This article tries to shed new light on these criticisms by examining three neglected aspects of the army's preparations for the campaign. It examines how the army was created from formations drawn from both Home Forces and 8th Army; it explores how its formations were trained in Britain before D-Day; it considers how senior commanders were selected to lead the army; and finally it demonstrates how athese issues had a significant influence on the combat capability of British troops in Normandy.     

Early Voting and Campaign News Coverage

The proportion of votes cast before election day has risen steadily over the last two decades. Previous research asked how early voting has impacted voter participation. In this article, we ask how early voting has affected the flow of information to voters through the mass media. By increasing the number of days voters are able to vote, are we also increasing the number of days that candidates and campaigns continuously disseminate campaign-related information to the news media? Is news coverage of campaigns quantitatively and qualitatively different when opportunities to vote early are available and utilized? Our expectation is that early voting significantly influences the volume and nature of campaign news coverage. We study the effects of early voting on campaign news coverage of gubernatorial and Senate races in 2006 and 2008. Our findings reveal that the volume and content of campaign news coverage is significantly influenced by early voting.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: Appendix for Early Voting and Campaign News Coverage—Alternative Model Specifications.]     

Making and Mobilizing Moderates: Rhetorical Strategy,Political Networks,and Counterterrorism

Studies of counterterrorism have argued for the importance of bolstering, or “mobilizing,” moderates in the confrontation with violent extremists. Yet the literature has not elucidated when states seek to mobilize moderates and marginalize extremists, how they do so, or when they prove successful. The received wisdom is that states should cultivate and strengthen moderate allies by reaching out to them. This approach, however, fails to grasp the political challenges confronting potential moderates, whose priority is to build and retain legitimacy within their political community. Inspired by network approaches, we maintain that moderates can more easily emerge when their political interactions with the authorities are relatively sparse. We further argue that the state's strategies, including crucially its rhetorical moves, can bolster the moderates' local legitimacy. At times, this will entail not reaching out to moderates but isolating them. Before moderates can be mobilized, they must be made, and the state's criticism, more than its love, may do much to help moderate political forces emerge. This article explains why mobilizing moderates is critical, when it is difficult, and how authorities can nevertheless play a productive role in moderates' emergence. We establish our theoretical framework's plausibility by examining two cases—India's ultimately triumphant campaign against Sikh extremists and Spain's gradual marginalization of Basque extremists. We then suggest what lessons these campaigns against ethnonational terrorism hold for the so-called War on Terror.     

Punitive Justifications or Just Punishment? An Ethical Reading of Coercive Diplomacy

Can the use of military force in response to violations of human rights norms be meaningfully described as ‘punishment’? If so, does this form of punishment help to constitute a just and peaceful international order? This paper investigates these two questions by examining the use of strategic bombing in campaigns of coercive diplomacy as a means to punish states. The paper explores the concept of punishment and its relevance for international affairs as a theoretical basis. It then turns to two cases of punitive uses of force—US and UK strikes against Iraq in 1998 and NATO strikes against Serbia in 1999. These two military campaigns are assessed as punitive but not necessarily just in that they fail to fit within a clear, legal institutional order and confuse the agent that deserves punishment. The paper concludes by suggesting that while punishment may be necessary for a legitimate international order, current punitive actions do not support such an order.     

A typology of communication functions in ballot issue campaigns

The increased importance of ballot issue campaigns creates a need for communication and political science scholars to study the rhetorical strategies employed in such campaigns. This essay presents a typology of four communication functions employed in successful ballot issue campaigns: education, trust development, development of a positive message, and neutralization of the opposition. The typology is applied to an analysis of the 1986 campaign for liquor‐by‐the‐drink in Kansas.     

When a Man Meets a Woman: Comparing the Use of Negativity of Male Candidates in Single- and Mixed-Gender Televised Debates

Much work has been done to analyze the consequences of the increasing representation of women in politics. Usually, this research compares male and female politicians from a female perspective. For instance, many studies in political communication investigate how and why female candidates show campaign styles similar to or different from their male colleagues. In contrast to this, few studies are interested in how men change their behavior when women enter the political arena. Some of these studies have demonstrated that men limit their negativity when confronted with female candidates. Unfortunately, these analyses focus predominantly on (a) the United States and (b) gender differences in campaign advertising. We seek to provide empirical evidence for non-U.S. campaigns from the most important single campaign events: televised debates. To do so, we analyze data covering all German televised debates broadcast since 1997 where male politicians participated in a two-candidate single- or mixed-gender debate. Our results indicate that the gender of the political opponent affects incivility but not the use of attacks in general. In mixed-gender debates there is less incivility. However, differences in the treatment of male and female opponents tend to decline over time. We conclude that female candidates transform campaign communication—not only because they communicate differently from men, but also because they influence male politicians’ political communication.     

A Review of: “Fred Schreier. WMD Proliferation: Reforming the Security Sector to Meet the Threat.”

ABSTRACT

Previous research has argued that political inequality between ethnic groups increases the likelihood of both nonviolent and violent protest. In this study, I focus on civil resistance campaigns and argue that the probability that these large-scale, organized movements will take violent over nonviolent forms increases with the share of a country’s population that is excluded from political power on the basis of ethnic affiliation. I expect this to be so because ethnically exclusive regimes are more likely to counter political demands with violent repression, which increases the cost and decreases the anticipated success of nonviolent relative to violent resistance. I test this proposition in a global sample of countries for the period 1950–2006 and find, first, that high levels of ethnic exclusion make civil resistance campaigns more likely to occur violently than nonviolently. Next, to assess the mechanism at play, I conduct a mediation analysis and show that almost half of the effect of ethnic exclusion on violent campaign onset is mediated by the latent level of violent repression in a country. This result suggests that political authorities’ repressive strategies are key to explaining why regime opponents do not always opt for nonviolent forms of civil resistance.     

Is There a Local Dimension to Modern Election Campaigns? Party Activists’ Perceptions of the Media and Electoral Coverage of Canadian Constituency Politics

Modern election campaign studies focus on national dimensions at the expense of attending to local campaigns in legislative elections. This is also true of analyses of media coverage and impact of election campaigns. This paper examines the local dimension of media and election campaigns across a wide range of diverse constituency contexts in Canada in order to identify the political, socioeconomic, and geographic determinants of constituency party associations ability to attract local media attention during an election campaign. We also examine the role of these features of the constituency settings and explain variations in satisfaction with the medias coverage of the local campaign.