I develop a method to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors using campaign finance data. Combined with a data set of over 100 million contribution records from state and federal ...elections, the method estimates ideal points for an expansive range of political actors. The common pool of contributors who give across institutions and levels of politics makes it possible to recover a unified set of ideological measures for members of Congress, the president and executive branch, state legislators, governors, and other state officials, as well as the interest groups and individuals who make political donations. Since candidates fundraise regardless of incumbency status, the method estimates ideal points for both incumbents and nonincumbents. After establishing measure validity and addressing issues concerning strategic behavior, I present results for a variety of political actors and discuss several promising avenues of research made possible by the new measures.
This essay spotlights some of the ways that the 2020 presidential campaign reified the sexism and racism baked into American politics. To demonstrate her suitability as Joe Biden's running mate, vice ...presidential candidate Kamala Harris had to downplay her skill as a prosecutor with political intellect and present herself more as a doting and submissive partner picked out of a group of women vying for Biden's attention. Such expressions of loyalty helped complete the rhetorical disciplining of Kamala Harris as a suitable vice-presidential pick.
The strategy of parties regarding which issues to emphasize during electoral campaigns is an important aspect of electoral competition. In this article, we advance research on electoral competition ...by developing a multidimensional model of electoral competition in which parties compete for electoral support by raising the electoral salience of position issues. We show that parties have incentives to advertise an issue on which the opponent has a more popular position or an issue on which neither party has electoral advantage. We also show that the party with the lower equilibrium vote share prefers to emphasize more controversial issues, while the party with the higher equilibrium vote share prefers to emphasize more consensual issues on its electoral agenda. The analysis provides a theoretical foundation for moving toward a more complete understanding of the content of campaign communication on issues on which voters disagree about which policies ought to be implemented. It also provides novel empirical predictions about how the structure of public opinion impacts the campaign strategy of parties, which can foster further empirical research on electoral campaigns and issue selection.
The European Parliament promised voters that the 2014 elections would be different. According to its interpretation of the Lisbon Treaty, a vote in these European elections would also be a vote for ...the President of the Europe's executive, the Commission. To reinforce this link between the European elections and the Commission President, the major political groups each nominated a lead candidate, Spitzenkandidat, for the post. This article examines how this innovation affected the 2014 elections. It concludes that the presidential candidates did not play a major role in the election campaigns, except in a handful of countries, and thus had a limited impact on voter participation and vote choices. However, the European Parliament was very successful in imposing its interpretation of the new modified procedure for electing the Commission President, not shared by all national governments, and this will have important implications for the inter-institutional dynamics in the Union and the future of European democracy.
How Do Campaigns Matter? Jacobson, Gary C
Annual review of political science,
05/2015, Volume:
18, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
A review of the evidence leaves no doubt election campaigns do matter in a variety of important ways. The serious questions concern when, where, why, how, for what, and for whom they matter. This ...essay reviews a selection of high-quality studies that address these questions, focusing on several distinct lines of research that have been particularly productive in recent years: on the effects of events and advertising in presidential elections; on the effects of campaign spending in elections for down-ballot offices; on the effects of mobilization campaigns on voting turnout; on campaign influences on the vote choice (with special attention to the effects of negative campaigns); and on the nature of persuadable voters. It also offers some suggestions of areas where additional research should be productive.
While existing work explains how journalists use news values to select some stories over others, we know little about how stories that meet newsworthiness criteria are prioritized. Once stories are ...deemed newsworthy, how do journalists calculate their relative utility? Such an ordering of preferences is important as higher ranked stories receive more media attention. To better understand how stories are ordered once they are selected, we propose a model for rational journalistic preferences which describes how journalists rank stories by making cost-benefit analyses. When faced with competing newsworthy stories, such as in an election context, the model can generate expectations regarding news coverage patterns. To illustrate model utility, we draw on a unique case – the US 2016 presidential election – to explain how reporters order newsworthy stories (e.g. scandal and the horse race) by observing changes in the volume. Our content data captures coverage featuring Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on major broadcast and cable networks over 31 weeks. We find that the rational journalistic preference model explains the imbalance of scandal coverage between the two candidates and the dominance of horse race coverage. In 2016, such preferences may have inadvertently contributed to a balance of news stories that favored Trump.
For years, mounting instability had led many to predict the imminent collapse of Yemen. These forecasts became reality in 2014 as the country spiralled into civil war. The conflict pits an alliance ...of the Houthis, a northern socio-political movement that had been fighting the central government since 2004, alongside troops loyal to a former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, against supporters and allies of the government overthrown by the Houthis in early 2015. The war became regionalized in March 2015 when a Saudi Arabia-led coalition of ten mostly Arab states launched a campaign of air strikes against the Houthis. According to Saudi Arabia, the Houthis are an Iranian proxy; they therefore frame the war as an effort to counter Iranian influence. This article will argue, however, that the Houthis are not Iranian proxies; Tehran's influence in Yemen is marginal. Iran's support for the Houthis has increased in recent years, but it remains low and is far from enough to significantly impact the balance of internal forces in Yemen. Looking ahead, it is unlikely that Iran will emerge as an important player in Yemeni affairs. Iran's interests in Yemen are limited, while the constraints on its ability to project power in the country are unlikely to be lifted. Tehran saw with the rise of the Houthis a low cost opportunity to gain some leverage in Yemen. It is unwilling, however, to invest larger amounts of resources. There is, as a result, only limited potential for Iran to further penetrate Yemen.
In this article we explore how certain religious messages may spur or constrain political participation. Specifically, we test whether religious messages that provide individuals a positive ...self-image can act as stimulants, giving people a sense of internal efficacy to participate in politics. We explore this hypothesis through a novel experimental design in Nairobi, Kenya. We find that exposure to self-affirmation messages typical of Pentecostal and Charismatic churches motivated participation in a political text message campaign. We discuss implications of these findings for politics in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as for the study of religion and politics more generally.
The Great Recession widened social‐class divides, so social interactions across gaps in workplace status and in race generally may be more salient and more fraught. Different statuses and races both ...carry stereotypes that targets know (meta‐perceptions, how they expect to be viewed by the outgroup). In both cross‐status and cross‐race interactions, targets may aim to manage the impressions they create. Reviewing literature and our own recent work invokes (a) the role of the Stereotype Content Model's two dimensions of social perception, namely warmth and competence; (b) the compensation effect, a tendency to tradeoff between them, especially downplaying one to convey the other; and (c) diverging warmth and competence concerns of people with lower and higher status and racial‐group positions. Higher‐status people and Whites, both stereotyped as competent but cold, seek to warm up their image. Lower‐status people and Blacks, both stereotyped as warm but incompetent, seek respect for their competence. Overviews of two previously separate research programs and the background literature converge on shared findings that higher‐status people, comparing down, display a competence downshift, consistent with communicating apparent warmth. Meanwhile, lower‐status people, comparing up, often display less warmth, to communicate competence. Previous research and our diverse samples—online workplace scenarios, online cross‐race interactions, and presidential candidates’ speeches—suggest a novel, robust interpersonal mechanism that perpetuates race, status, and social‐class divides.
Social media has an undeniable role in presidential campaigns. Starting with Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008, on one hand, scholars and practitioners have embraced the potential ...and importance of these platforms. The 2016 presidential elections, on the other hand, raised concerns about social media’s role in democratic processes as debates about how the platforms can sow misinformation have become mainstream. I argue that there has been a positive outcome of such debates: new data sources. Understanding their role—and their probable potential to do “harm”—social media platforms have worked toward increasing transparency in the political advertisements they carry. From Snapchat to Facebook, transparency reports share detailed information on how political groups, including presidential nominees, have utilized their platforms, targeted audiences, and disseminated calls-to-action. In this article, I argue that these transparency attempts will be invaluable data resources for political communication scholars to better explain how voter choice and candidate positioning work within digital media ecology. I answer four sample research questions about 2020 Presidential Elections in the United States to demonstrate the potential of these data sets in shedding light on how issues, identities, and time-relevant variables change political advertising in presidential campaigns.
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