The Ground Game in the 2012 Presidential Election

Relatively little research has examined the effects of campaign-led field activity in a competitive election. In this article, we leverage a unique data set containing the location of every Barack Obama and Mitt Romney field office and county-level data on the presidential vote to understand how communication with voters in the field may have affected the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We find that the presence of Obama field offices was associated with greater Obama vote share at the county level, although we cannot detect a similar relationship for Romney field offices. We conduct additional robustness tests to address the potential limitations of these observational data. Ultimately, we conclude that even if Obama’s field organization out-performed Romney’s, the aggregate impact of Obama’s field organization was not large enough to determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential election.     

Is President Obama’s Race Chronically Accessible? Racial Priming in the 2012 Presidential Election

A vast literature indicates that racial animosity has a pervasive influence on the public’s evaluations of U.S. President Barack Obama. Can political communications enhance and/or defuse the link between White Americans’ racial attitudes and evaluations of Barack Obama? In this article, we report the results of an experiment conducted in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign which examines the effect of political rhetoric on the extent to which evaluations of Barack Obama are racialized. Drawing from research on attitude strength and pretreatment effects in experimental studies, we argue that the use of racial appeals in the pretreatment environment and the strength of citizens’ preexisting attitudes toward the incumbent president may produce a downward bias in average estimates of racial priming effects toward President Obama. After accounting for individual differences in the propensity to form strong attitudes with need to evaluate, we observe substantial effects of campaign rhetoric in priming racial attitudes toward President Obama, especially among individuals who are low in the need to evaluate and who tend to have more malleable political attitudes. We conclude by discussing implications for research on racial priming and the politics of racial intolerance in evaluations of Barack Obama.     

Accentuating the Negative: Candidate Race and Campaign Strategy

This article examines the impact of candidate race and campaign negativity on candidate evaluations and turnout. Unlike previous research, we argue that candidate race and campaign negativity should be considered simultaneously. In order to test this argument, we conduct a survey experiment of a nationally representative sample of White adults and a replication study. While we find, consistent with previous research, that respondents unfavorably evaluate candidates who decide to sponsor a negative ad, there are two important exceptions to this pattern: When the ad sponsor is Black, among White respondents who view Blacks negatively, the penalty for going negative is disproportionately large, while among White respondents who view Blacks positively, the penalty for going negative is disproportionately small. More generally, our findings suggest that the effects of candidate attributes and campaign strategy on voter behavior should not be considered in isolation, as they are mutually reinforcing.     

To Tell the Truth: Ad Watch Coverage,Ad Tone,and the Accuracy of Political Advertising

This study examined the relationships among newspaper ad watch coverage, ad tone, and the accuracy of political advertising. A sample of political advertisements (N = 160) was drawn from the Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG) database and other sources for eight U.S. Senate races. Two experts on each race evaluated the ads’ accuracy and their ideological portrayals of candidates, while trained coders analyzed other aspects of the ads. Ad watch coverage from these races (ad watch N = 109) also was content-analyzed. The number of ad watches overall in a race and the number that explicitly criticized ads were positively related with the level of accuracy of political ads and with a tendency to portray their favored candidates closer to their actual ideological position—but the overall number of ad watches also was positively related with a tendency for ads to portray opponents as more extreme than their positions warranted. Ad watches usually tend to scrutinize negative ads more, but ad watch coverage in this study was unrelated with ad tone and with the number of negative ads in a race. Positive ads were rated as more accurate but also more prone to exaggerate the supported candidates’ centrism compared to other ads. Normative and practical implications are discussed.

We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.

— Neil Newhouse, pollster for the Mitt Romney 2012 campaign     

奥巴马的“新政”及美国对华政策走向

奥巴马以倡导“新政”当选美国总统。美国长期奉行的经济自由主义政策将会终结；单边主义外交政策将会被多边主义取代。奥巴马政府的经济政策可能会在经贸、汇率、环境、知识产权以及人权等问题上给中国造成压力；多边主义外交将增加中美磋商与合作的机会。奥巴马“新政”下的中美建设性合作伙伴关系将会继续发展。     

试析未来美国对外政策的走向

奥巴马国家安全团队组成人员基本上都是经验丰富的温和务实派,体现了美国外交和国际安全问题上的现实主义倾向。美国外交将改变布什政府的单边主义,注重多边合作。中美关系不会过于偏离正常轨道,但在诸如知识产权、汇率、人权、应对全球气候变化等问题上,中国可能面临更多的压力。     

A ‘pivot’ that never existed: America’s Asian strategy under Obama and Trump

This article argues that Donald Trump’s Asian strategy hardly marks a radical transformation from Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’. This is because the ‘pivot to Asia’ never really existed. Although Obama was successful in building legitimacy for the strategy through international norms, he failed to translate his lofty rhetoric into practice. Much of his original pivot components (building a constructive relationship with China, coordinating with Asian allies and multilateralism in the Association of South East Asian Nations and the Trans-Pacific Partnership) has either failed or did not live up to expectations. Donald Trump was adamant that the Asian pivot was a bad strategy and that he would not follow it. But although he completely discarded Obama’s legitimization of the rebalance (as Trump speaks pragmatically and does not care about international norms), in actuality he has followed many of Obama’s policies, and even improved on some of them. That being said, Trump’s ‘pivot actions’ appear to be erratic, pragmatic short-term actions rather than a meticulously planned long-term strategy similar to Obama’s rebalance (which did not materialize). Thus, while Obama failed to transform the pivot into an effective strategy, neither is Trump’s effectiveness backed by a coherent Asian strategy.     

The role of nonformal education in promoting democratic attitudes: Findings from Senegal

Civic education has been considered a way in which the behaviours and attitudes associated with democratic citizenship can be fostered among the members of a society. Since the emerging democracies are hard-pressed to develop a political culture supportive of democratic rule, civic education has been identified as one way such a political culture can be constructed. Recent studies, however, point to the limited reach of such programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on survey data, others have failed to find even a relationship between formal education and democratic attitudes in parts of Africa. On the other hand, despite the prominence nonformal education has gained in many developing countries, such as those in Africa, the effect of nonformal education on political attitudes has not been subject to empirical testing. Using data from a survey involving a probability sample of 1,484 Senegalese citizens, this article examines the effects of education, both formal and nonformal, on political attitudes among rural Senegalese. Both nonformal and formal education are found to increase the likelihood that people will embrace democratic, tolerant attitudes in Senegal.     

奥巴马政府《国家反恐战略》评析

2011年6月29日美国公布了新版《国家反恐战略》,这是奥巴马政府上台后发布的首份反恐战略,既是对其执政以来反恐实践的总结,也是今后美国反恐的指导性框架文件。这一战略是奥巴马政府对美国十年反恐战争进行反思的基础上对反恐的定位、框架和方式等进行重新思考的结果,但其局限性依然存在,对今后美国反恐成效的影响还待观察。     

Improving Media Measurement: Evidence From the Field

In light of a recent exchange between Prior (2013a) and Dilliplane, Goldman, and Mutz (2013), we evaluate the new American National Election Study program-count measures of news exposure using a unique dataset that tracks self-reports as well as actual exposure to news collected via passive tracking devices. We bring these data to bear on concerns raised by Prior (2013a) about the construct and convergent validity of the new ANES measures. Our results add nuance to previous findings showing respondents’ propensity to overreport exposure to news, and also demonstrate that on average, self-reported measures reflect relative levels of exposure quite well. Additionally, we show that the more unique news programs a person watches, the more total time he or she is exposed to political news. Very few people watch only one program but watch it repeatedly. The data also reveal an increase in the number of programs watched leading up to election day, and a concomitant increase in the amount of time per capita spent with political news as elections approach. We conclude, however, that the program-count measure is not without its weaknesses. Shortening the list of programs affects construct validity by introducing noise into the low end of the scale. Expanding the list of programs in the survey to include local news and special reports will improve fidelity at the low end of this new measure.     

Tweets That Matter: Evidence From a Randomized Field Experiment in Japan

Although election campaigns are increasingly utilizing social media, only a few studies have investigated their effects experimentally. To fill this gap in the literature, we conducted a field experiment to examine the effects of a campaign that used Twitter during the 2013 House of Councillors election in Japan. The treatment was exposure to tweets from Tōru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, who has the largest number of Twitter followers among Japanese politicians. Participants assigned to the treatment group followed Hashimoto and the two placebos, whereas those assigned to the control condition followed only the two placebos. They followed the politicians continuously for approximately one month. Pre- and posttreatment measures were collected using online surveys, and treatment compliance was continuously checked via Twitter application programming interface (API). Following Hashimoto on Twitter during the election campaign had a positive impact on feelings toward Hashimoto. This effect was not mediated by issue knowledge or the evaluation of Hashimoto’s personal traits, and no effects were observed on voting. These findings suggest that repeated exposure to a politician’s messages on Twitter may only result in a mere exposure effect, which nevertheless generates favorable overall attitudes about the politician.     

Vicarious Retribution in US Public Support for War Against Iraq

US public anger and desire to avenge the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were redirected toward Iraq partly because of its identity as an Arab and Muslim state. Online panel survey data reveal that citizens who were relatively angry about the terror attacks were more belligerent toward Iraq, an effect that was strongest among those who perceived Arabs and Muslims in monolithic terms. The angry desire to avenge 9/11 was more persistent for those who saw Arabs and Muslims in that light, and its effect on war support was partially mediated by worsened feelings about Arabs and Muslims in general. These findings help explain why public belligerence toward Iraq shot up right after 9/11, before President George W. Bush began alleging that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al Qaeda.     

Change Nobody Believes In: Obama and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Despite the promise of ‘change’ in President Barack Obama's early dealings with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the policy that has since emanated from the White House was in fact commensurate with those of preceding administrations. Rather than heralding a new direction for American engagement with the conflict, the Obama Administration had displayed more patterns of continuity than change in its dealings with both parties. Specifically, by continuing to act as “Israel's attorney” during negotiations, the Obama team had in effect negated the president's early pledges to act as an honest broker in the conflict. In assessing the (in)effectiveness of the Administration's management of the Israeli–Palestinian issue, it seems that on-going mediation efforts to revive the moribund peace process have exhausted their potential. Arbitration may be explored as a more effective method to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian territorial dispute.     

Learning to Build a Better Mousetrap

Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential election and 2006 subnational elections, but argue that our model and results are broadly applicable within the field of political communication. We find that the bulk of the persuasive impact of advertising decays quickly, but that some effect in the presidential campaign endures for at least 6 weeks. These results, which are similar in rolling cross-section survey data and county-level data on actual presidential vote, appear to reflect a mix of memory-based processing (whose effects last only as long as short-term memory lasts) and online processing (whose effects are more durable). Finally, we find that immediate effects of advertising are larger in subnational than presidential elections, but decay more quickly and more completely. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): discussion of methodological issues; results for a alternative specifications of key models; full reports of model results.]     

Does civil war breed authoritarian values? An empirical study of Bosnia-Herzegovina,Kosovo and Croatia

This article analyses how armed conflict affects individual support for liberal values. It is commonly assumed that the consolidation of democracy depends on individual values such as tolerance as well as aspirations of civil and political liberty. For post-conflict societies, consolidating democracy is also a means of reducing the risk of recurring violent conflict. However, democracy has proven to be especially hard to achieve and consolidate in ethnically divided societies. While previous research has centred mainly on institutions and political elites, I expand the focus to also include ordinary citizens. Using survey data from post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia, I examine the effect of exposure to violence on a scale of authoritarian values. While the effects are small, the results show that war-related violence in some cases leads people to embrace authoritarian values.     

Leaders Without Borders: Familiarity as a Moderator of Transnational Source Cue Effects

The role of source cue effects in transnational persuasion (in which a foreign actor attempts to persuade an audience in another jurisdiction) is largely unexplored in both the political communication and international relations literatures. This article investigates transnational source cue effects using two source cue experiments that test the persuasiveness of German chancellor Angela Merkel and UK prime minister David Cameron in a Canadian context. The experiments were embedded in an online survey administered to student participants at a Canadian university in January 2011. As might be expected, the foreign leaders exerted positive source cue effects among participants who held positive impressions of the leaders and backlash effects among those who held strongly negative impressions. These effects, however, were moderated by participants’ level of political awareness, with the largest effects observed among participants who had an intermediate level of awareness. It is argued that this nonlinear moderating effect can be attributed to the countervailing effects of attitude stability and source familiarity (both of which are associated with political awareness) on individuals’ susceptibility to source cue effects. Finally, cueing David Cameron had approximately equivalent source cue effects on participants’ attitudes towards government spending on foreign aid and welfare, suggesting that foreign leaders may be able to move opinion on domestic as well as on foreign policy issues. Overall, these results validate existing models of source cue effects in a transnational context and point to the scope and limitations of national leaders’ ability to engage in direct public diplomacy.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: Appendix: Question Wordings for Survey Experiments; Table A1: Balance Tests for Afghanistan and Cameron Cue Experiments; and Table A2: Underlying Salience of Domestic and Foreign Policy Spending.]     

A Review Of: “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism”

The growth and dispersion of America’s immigrant population exposes increasing numbers of non-Hispanic Whites to Spanish. Yet the political impacts of that exposure depend on whether Democrats and Republicans respond in similar ways. To address that question, this article first presents survey experiments showing that exposure to Spanish increases restrictive immigration attitudes only among Republicans. To confirm the external validity of that result, the article then presents an analysis of California’s Proposition 227 indicating that support for ending bilingual education was higher in heavily White, Republican block groups with Spanish-language ballots. No such pattern appears in Democratic block groups. Together, these findings demonstrate that Spanish is a politicized symbol, provoking different responses among Whites depending on their partisanship. To the extent that other immigration-related cues produce similar effects, the salience of immigration seems likely to reinforce existing partisan divisions rather than undermining them.     

Why has the United States not bombed Iran? The domestic politics of America's response to Iran's nuclear programme

Why has the United States (US), under both the Bush and Obama administrations, refrained from attacking Iran even though US officials have depicted the Iranian threat in all but apocalyptic terms and even though a loud chorus in Washington has been persistently calling for a preventive strike against Iran? I present an analysis—informed by Graham Allison's famous bureaucratic politics model—of the main political and bureaucratic forces in Washington acting to promote or impede a preventive attack on Iran's nuclear sites. I argue that America's abstention from attacking Iran should be understood not as a coherent national response to Iran's nuclear programme but rather as (in Allison's terms) an ‘intra-national political outcome’ resulting from the ‘pulling’ of ‘Iran Threat’ interests—primarily Vice President Cheney's camp in the Bush White House, members of Congress, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—and the countervailing ‘hauling’ of the Pentagon, the military's top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State. The main reason why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has opted for a military strike is that the ‘haulers’, who were led by a formidable bureaucratic-political player, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have had the upper hand over the hawkish ‘pullers’.     

美国奥巴马政府的南亚政策初探

随着奥巴马大选胜出和入主白宫,美国的南亚政策和美印关系的发展走向再次引起国际社会的关注。普遍关心的问题包括美国南亚政策的调整、奥巴马政府扩大在阿富汗和巴基斯坦的反恐行动、美印战略关系前景、美国对印巴关系的影响,以及美国对印美民用核合作、克什米尔争端的具体政策选择。本文试探讨奥巴马政府的南亚政策、反恐战略、美印关系走向及可能对该地区局势产生的外交与安全效应。     

在变与不变中前行——-2011年拉美和加勒比形势回顾与展望

2011年拉美和加勒比地区形势保持相对平稳,其基本发展趋势没有改变.政治形势在稳定中有变化,选民更加务实,民生主导政治将成趋势,顺应民心的调整将成为常态,在变与不变中保持平衡成为拉美政治稳定的挑战.2012年墨西哥和委内瑞拉大选将对地区政治产生重要影响.拉美经济持续增长,宏观经济继续保持稳定,“反周期”政策作用明显.未来,拉美经济仍面临通胀和结构性调整的压力,欧债危机对拉美实体经济的影响不容忽视,世界经济低速常态化将会带来新挑战,个别国家和地区经济内在矛盾有可能激化.社会形势喜忧参半,就业和收入有所改善,极端贫困人口增加,毒品、有组织犯罪和暴力问题依然突出,部分国家印第安人自身利益与政府开发资源、发展经济的矛盾将有可能成为新的社会问题.对外关系基本格局未变,新的变化正在出现,区域合作分层化和自贸区板块化的趋势显现,地区主义出现不同选项,对外关系面临新的调整.