The campaign
The Roles of District and National Opinion in 2010 Congressional Campaign Agendas
Matthew Pietryka
American Politics Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
A primary goal of congressional elections is to create a link between constituent opinion and representative behavior. Explanations of congressional campaign agendas, however, have focused on national measures of issue salience and ownership, ignoring opinion within districts. Moreover, no study has systematically assessed the relative influence of issue salience and ownership. This article seeks to address these gaps using several public opinion surveys and a content analysis of 2010 House campaign websites. The analysis demonstrates significant across-district variation in citizens' priorities and preferences, yet finds no discernible relationship between district opinion and campaign issue agendas. In contrast, the analysis suggests that campaign issue emphasis is positively associated with the issue's national salience and party ownership, but salience appears to be the stronger predictor. Together, the results suggest that the 2010 candidates used their campaign issue agendas to forge a national strategy, rather than emphasize identification with their constituents.
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Still Part of the Conversation: Iowa and New Hampshire's Say within the Invisible Primary
Dino Christenson & Corwin Smidt
Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2012, Pages 597-621
Abstract:
We propose that the extant literature has underestimated the central roles of Iowa and New Hampshire within the invisible primary and, thus, party nominations. Since candidates and the news media focus disproportionately on these states early in the nomination season, impressions of candidate performance within these states have a disproportionate influence on the invisible primary long before their actual outcomes are observed. Using a Bayesian vector autoregression we find that polls within Iowa and New Hampshire have a more consistent influence on candidates' levels of national news media coverage and national polling than vice versa. We also find that campaign contributions are as responsive to early state polls as they are to national forces or campaign activities. Although these findings do not dispute that candidates need a broad basis of national support to win a party's nomination, they explain why candidates continue to campaign early and intensely in these first-in-the-nation contests.
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Superdelegate Decision Making during the 2008 Democratic Primaries
Christopher Galdieri, Kevin Parsneau & Scott Granberg-Rademacker
Politics & Policy, August 2012, Pages 680-703
Abstract:
The race for superdelegate support during the extended competition between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination offers a unique opportunity to examine the behavior of party elites with regard to their party's rank and file. The choice and timing of superdelegates' endorsements were examined, as well as measures of superdelegate loyalty, enthusiasm, considerations of candidate viability, and strategic endorsements. Did superdelegates endorse candidates based on personal or political ties, or to settle old political scores, as much of the press coverage suggested? Did superdelegates try to hijack the nomination for a candidate other than the one preferred by party rank-and-file participants in primaries and caucuses? We find that, taken in the aggregate, superdelegate endorsements were based on systematic considerations about candidates' standing as measured by national opinion polling, state support for candidates, and the candidate delegate count. Furthermore, female superdelegates showed more enthusiastic support for Clinton, while elected officials who were superdelegates were more likely to support Obama.
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Did the Tea Party Win the House for the Republicans in the 2010 House Elections?
Jon Bond, Richard Fleisher & Nathan Ilderton
The Forum, July 2012
Abstract:
We test the hypothesis that the Tea Party won the House for Republicans in 2010. We find no support for this hypothesis. Instead, we find that variables long cited in the literature on congressional elections - in particular, the incumbent's previous electoral performance, the normal party vote in the district, candidate spending, and challenger experience - best explain the results of the 2010 elections.
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The Consequences of Partisanship in Economic Perceptions
Peter Enns, Paul Kellstedt & Gregory McAvoy
Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 2012, Pages 287-310
Abstract:
We investigate the role of economic perceptions in macropolitical analyses, with a particular focus on the role that partisanship might play in shaping consumer sentiment. Instead of taking consumer sentiment at the fully aggregated level, as is customary, we disaggregate by party in order to see the effects of partisanship on over-time evaluations of the economy. Analyzing four presidential administrations' worth of public opinion data, we find that differences in Republicans' and Democrats' beliefs about the changing economy do not cancel in the aggregate. Furthermore, our macroanalysis shows that the endogeneity of consumer sentiment to partisanship leads to a clear overestimate of the role of consumer sentiment on approval of the president's handling of the economy.
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The Election Timing Effect: Evidence from a Policy Intervention in Texas
Sarah Anzia
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, June 2012, Pages 209-248
Abstract:
Many governments in the United States hold elections on days other than national Election Day. Recent studies have argued that the low voter turnout that accompanies such off-cycle elections could create an advantage for interest groups. However, the endogeneity of election timing makes it difficult to estimate its causal effect on political outcomes. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework that explains how changes to election timing affect the electoral fortunes of organized interest groups. I test the theory by examining the effects of a 2006 Texas law that forced approximately 20 percent of the state's school districts to move their elections to the same day as national elections. Using matching as well as district fixed effects regression, I estimate the causal effect of the switch to on-cycle election timing on district teacher salaries, since teachers and their unions tend to be the dominant interest group in school board elections. I find that school districts that were forced to switch to on-cycle elections responded by granting significantly lower salary raises to teachers, supporting the hypothesis that school trustees were less responsive to the dominant interest group after the switch.
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It's All in the Name: Source Cue Ambiguity and the Persuasive Appeal of Campaign Ads
Christopher Weber, Johanna Dunaway & Tyler Johnson
Political Behavior, September 2012, Pages 561-584
Abstract:
As strategies for campaign political advertising become more complex, there remains much to learn about how ad characteristics shape voter reactions to political messages. Drawing from existing literature on source credibility, we expect ad sponsorship will have meaningful effects on voter reactions to political advertisements. We test this by using an original experiment, where we expose a sample of student and non-student participants to equivalent ads and vary only the paid sponsor disclaimer at the end of the message. The only thing that differs across stimuli is whether a political candidate, a known interest group, or an unknown interest group sponsors the advertisement. Following exposure to one of these ads, participants complete a posttest battery of questions measuring the persuasiveness of the message, source credibility, and message legitimacy. We find that ads sponsored by unknown interest groups are more persuasive than those sponsored by candidates or known interest groups, and persuasion is mediated by perceived credibility of the source. We conclude by discussing our findings and their implications for our understanding of contemporary campaigns.
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Olle Folke & James Snyder
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article studies gubernatorial midterm slumps in U.S. state legislative elections. We employ a regression discontinuity design, which allows us to rule out the hypothesis that the midterm slump simply reflects a type of "reversion to the mean" generated by simple partisan swings or the withdrawal of gubernatorial coattails or "anticipatory balancing." Our results show that the party of the governor experiences an average seat-share loss of about 3.5 percentage points. We also find evidence suggesting that a large share of the variation in gubernatorial midterm slumps can be accounted for by (1) crude partisan balancing and (2) referendums on state economic performance, with approximately equal weight given to each.
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Nixon's New Deal: Welfare Reform for the Silent Majority
Scott Spitzer
Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2012, Pages 455-481
Abstract:
Utilizing recently opened politically sensitive materials at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, this article shows how welfare reform became increasingly important to the Nixon administration's political ambitions for a new conservative majority, consisting of southern white conservatives and northern working- and middle-class white voters. Welfare reform rose to the top of the president's domestic policy agenda for a number of reasons, but the president selected the Family Assistance Plan (FAP) over more conservative alternatives in keeping with his political aims: the FAP would redistribute federal welfare to the white working poor in northern metropolitan areas, while simultaneously increasing federal welfare spending in southern states. As the 1970 midterm elections approached, however, the predominant political focus for the FAP became the effort to appeal to blue-collar, northern white-ethnic voters. In the aftermath of the disappointing results from those elections, President Nixon and his political team became convinced that a New Deal-style redistributive strategy was ineffective in appealing to conservative voters in the "silent majority," especially southern conservatives who were opposed to any expansion of federal welfare, even when they would benefit directly. Instead, Nixon began to emphasize the FAP's value as a platform for launching strong rhetorical attacks on welfare. While the president subsequently pulled back from pushing for FAP's legislative enactment, offering an important explanation for the measure's failure, his antiwelfare rhetoric was politically successful, providing subsequent national conservative leaders with a political formula for utilizing antiwelfare rhetoric to build support among white working- and middle-class voters.
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The Short-Term Effect of Going Public
Amnon Cavari
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the direct, short-term effect of presidential communications on policy preferences. Using panel studies and post-speech surveys, I demonstrate that following a speech, public opinion changes in the direction of the president. This effect is strongest among people who watch the president. While the number of people who tune to the president may be small, indeed getting smaller over time, it is composed of people who participate in the political process, are more likely to affect it, and therefore are of interest to opinion leaders. The findings reveal that presidents are effective leaders of public opinion.
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Stephen Nicholson & Gary Segura
Political Behavior, June 2012, Pages 369-389
Abstract:
Some observers of American politics have argued that Republicans have redrawn the social class basis of the parties by displacing the Democrats as the party of the common person. While others have addressed the argument by implication, we address the phenomenon itself. That is, we examine whether the populist rhetoric used by conservatives has reshaped the American public's perceptions about the social class basis of American political parties. To this end, we used NES data and created novel survey questions for examining the class-based images of the parties. We examine whether the public holds populist images of the Republican Party and whether the working class and evangelical Christians are especially likely to hold this belief. Contrary to this argument, most Americans view the Democrats as the party of the people. Furthermore, working class and evangelical Christians are no less likely to hold this belief.
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State Electoral Institutions and Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections, 1920-2000
Melanie Springer
State Politics & Policy Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Expansive and restrictive state electoral institutions have been instrumental in structuring the vote throughout American history. Studies focused on a small number of reforms, years, or states lack the scope necessary to comprehensively evaluate the effects of institutional change over time. This work, however, places recent reforms in historical context and offers a long-term perspective. Using an original data set, it identifies the institutions that have generated the most substantial effects on state turnout rates during presidential elections from 1920 to 2000. Findings demonstrate that restrictive laws (those aiming to limit the vote or make voting more costly) produced large and consistently negative effects in the Southern and non-Southern states alike, but the effects associated with expansive reforms (those making participation more convenient or less costly) vary. Although a few expansive laws have increased turnout in the non-Southern states, they have had no effect in the Southern states where turnout rates are lowest.
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Electoral Security of Members of the U.S. House, 1900-2006
Arjun Wilkins
Legislative Studies Quarterly, August 2012, Pages 277-304
Abstract:
Previous studies have documented that the increase in the incumbency advantage in the 1960s did not decrease the probability of defeat of incumbents in the U.S. House. I define a method for establishing bounds on the probability of incumbent defeat and find that it decreases significantly in the 1950s, before the rise of the incumbency advantage. Incumbency advantage does not have a direct relationship with incumbent defeat rates, raising questions about the use of the incumbency advantage as a means for making inferences about the electoral security of incumbents.
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Carlee Beth Hawkins & Brian Nosek
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Reporting an Independent political identity does not guarantee the absence of partisanship. Independents demonstrated considerable variability in relative identification with Republicans versus Democrats as measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT; M = 0.10, SD = 0.47). To test whether this variation predicted political judgment, participants read a newspaper article describing two competing welfare (Study 1) or special education (Study 2) policies. The authors manipulated which policy was proposed by which party. Among self-proclaimed Independents, those who were implicitly Democratic preferred the liberal welfare plan, and those who were implicitly Republican preferred the conservative welfare plan. Regardless of the policy details, these implicit partisans preferred the policy proposed by "their" party, and this effect occurred more strongly for implicit than explicit plan preference. The authors suggest that implicitly partisan Independents may consciously override some partisan influence when making explicit political judgments, and Independents may identify as such to appear objective even when they are not.
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Michael Brogan & Jonathan Mendilow
Politics & Policy, June 2012, Pages 492-518
Abstract:
Supporters of public campaign funding say it democratizes the election process; detractors say it fails to meet its intended goals and, in fact, has unexpected negative results. Examining data from Arizona and Maine, which have full public funding, and from New Jersey's "Clean Election" pilot program, has enabled us to determine empirically if critics are correct. We conclude that neither advocates of Clean Elections nor its detractors are completely accurate. Rather, public campaign funding enhances trends that already existed where it was implemented without sparking new ones.
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Rethinking the Development of Legitimate Party Opposition in the United States, 1793-1828
Jeffrey Selinger
Political Science Quarterly, Summer 2012, Pages 263-287
Abstract:
Jeffrey S. Selinger reassesses the rhetoric of anti-partisanship of the early national period. The election of 1800 demonstrated that a mechanism had been invented for changing government, personnel, and policies without violence and destructiveness. The election rendered parties legitimate and was the functional equivalent of a revolution. This achievement, however, did not become widely accepted by Americans for at least another quarter of a century.
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Emails from Official Sources Can Increase Turnout
Neil Malhotra, Melissa Michelson & Ali Adam Valenzuela
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, June 2012, Pages 321-332
Abstract:
Previous research by Nickerson (2007a) testing 13 email get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns concludes that email from third parties is not an effective method of increasing voter turnout. We conducted three rounds of email GOTV experiments in San Mateo County, California, in cooperation with the local registrar, the elected official responsible for administering elections. Unsolicited emails sent from the registrar consistently increased turnout among registered voters. The treatment effects are small, but statistically significant. In contrast, identical messages sent from a fictional voter mobilization organization had no measurable effect, consistent with Nickerson's results. We conclude that email sent from an official source can in fact be a cost-effective method of increasing turnout.
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The Effect of the Top Two Primary on the Number of Primary Candidates
John Beck & Kevin Henrickson
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objectives: Washington State held its first "top two primary" in 2008. Under this system, the two candidates receiving the most votes move on to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. This study empirically examines the potential incentive under this top two primary system for each political party to discourage "excess" party candidates from entering primary contests.
Methods: We examine this possibility by looking at the Washington State Legislative Primaries in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010. With these data, we estimate the factors impacting the number of primary candidates in a race for each political party, including the change in the primary format in 2008.
Results: Our results indicate that the switch to the top two primary reduced the likelihood of having multiple Democratic candidates in a race, reduced the number of "excess" Democratic candidates, but did not have a significant impact on Republican candidates.
Conclusion: With many states revising their primary systems, an understanding of the incentives present under alternative systems is critical. As such, the results presented in this study provide evidence that the top two primary gives the political parties an incentive to discourage excess primary candidates.
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Judicial Independence and Retention Elections
Brandice Canes-Wrone, Tom Clark & Jee-Kwang Park
Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, June 2012, Pages 211-234
Abstract:
Judges face retention elections in over a third of US state courts of last resort and numerous lower courts. According to conventional wisdom, these elections engender judicial independence and decrease democratic accountability. We argue that in the context of modern judicial campaigns, retention elections create pressure for judges to cater to public opinion on "hot-button" issues that are salient to voters. Moreover, this pressure can be as great as that in contestable elections. We test these arguments by comparing decisions across systems with retention, partisan, and nonpartisan contestable elections. Employing models that account for judge- and state-specific effects, we analyze new data regarding abortion cases decided by state supreme courts between 1980 and 2006. The results provide strong evidence for the arguments.
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Who Moves? Elite and mass-level depolarization in Britain, 1987-2001
James Adams, Jane Green & Caitlin Milazzo
Electoral Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Over the past two decades the British Labour and Conservative parties have depolarized on economic and social welfare policy, at both the elite and mass levels. We ask the question: Does mass-level depolarization in Britain extend throughout the electorate, or is it confined primarily to the stratum of affluent, educated, and politically-engaged citizens? We report longitudinal analyses of British Election Study respondents' policy beliefs and partisan loyalties over the period 1987-2001, and find that depolarization extends across all subgroups in the electorate, as do perceptions of elite depolarization. These effects are (moderately) more pronounced among the electoral subgroups of highly educated, affluent, and politically informed citizens. The findings have important implications for elite representation of voters' policy preferences, and for differences in representation patterns between Britain and the United States.
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Correcting mistakes: Cognitive dissonance and political attitudes in Sweden and the United States
Mikael Elinder
Public Choice, October 2012, Pages 235-249
Abstract:
Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that the act of voting makes people more positive toward the party or candidate they have voted for. Following Mullainathan and Washington (Am. Econ. J. Appl. Econ. 1:86-111, 2009), I test this prediction by using exogenous variation in turnout provided by the voting age restriction. I improve on previous studies by investigating political attitudes, measured just before elections, when they are highly predictive of voting. In contrast to earlier studies I find no effect of voting on political attitudes. This result holds for both Sweden and the United States.