In it to win it
Thomas Wood
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2016, Pages 110-125
Abstract:
This article investigates the purpose and effects of presidential campaign visits. I recount common strategic rationales for rallies, town hall meetings, impromptu conversations, and the like, and then show how candidate visits are geographically assigned. I also investigate the impact of campaign visits, finding that while state-level political factors influence the location of visits, the visits themselves have little effect on local media markets. Finally, a bespoke survey is used to measure visits’ influence on visited and unvisited respondents in the closing stages of the 2012 presidential election: respondents are shown to have little knowledge about candidate visits, and the visits themselves have only a small and evanescent effect on voter intentions.
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The Broadcast of Shared Attention and Its Impact on Political Persuasion
Garriy Shteynberg et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In democracies where multitudes yield political influence, so does broadcast media that reaches those multitudes. However, broadcast media may not be powerful simply because it reaches a certain audience, but because each of the recipients is aware of that fact. That is, watching broadcast media can evoke a state of shared attention, or the perception of simultaneous coattention with others. Whereas past research has investigated the effects of shared attention with a few socially close others (i.e., friends, acquaintances, minimal ingroup members), we examine the impact of shared attention with a multitude of unfamiliar others in the context of televised broadcasting. In this paper, we explore whether shared attention increases the psychological impact of televised political speeches, and whether fewer numbers of coattending others diminishes this effect. Five studies investigate whether the perception of simultaneous coattention, or shared attention, on a mass broadcasted political speech leads to more extreme judgments. The results indicate that the perception of synchronous coattention (as compared with coattending asynchronously and attending alone) renders persuasive speeches more persuasive, and unpersuasive speeches more unpersuasive. We also find that recall memory for the content of the speech mediates the effect of shared attention on political persuasion. The results are consistent with the notion that shared attention on mass broadcasted information results in deeper processing of the content, rendering judgments more extreme. In all, our findings imply that shared attention is a cognitive capacity that supports large-scale social coordination, where multitudes of people can cognitively prioritize simultaneously coattended information.
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How Outside Spending Shapes American Democracy
Nour Abdul-Razzak, Carlo Prato & Stephane Wolton
Columbia University Working Paper, August 2016
Abstract:
This paper examines how lifting a ban on contributions from corporations and unions to groups engaging in outside spending (independent political advertising) affects electoral outcomes, representatives' ideology, and targeted public good provision. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that removing constraints on the funding of outside spending improves the electoral chances of Republican candidates and leads to more conservative state legislatures. We also provide moderate evidence that these regulatory changes have increased polarization and some types of targeted public good provision. Using a game-theoretic framework, we show that these empirical results are consistent with an increase in the salience of local Republican candidates and (at worst) a moderate decrease in the salience of local Democratic candidates relative to national factors such as partisan tides. Our theoretical and empirical findings provide a first step towards understanding the role outside spending and, more generally, a more complete view of special interest group influence in elections.
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A High Bar or a Double Standard? Gender, Competence, and Information in Political Campaigns
Tessa Ditonto
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study seeks to determine whether subjects in two dynamic process tracing experiments react differently to information related to a candidate’s competence when that candidate is a woman, vs. when he is a man. I find that subjects evaluate a candidate whose competence is in doubt less favorably, and are less likely to vote for the candidate, when she is a woman. In general, evaluations of women seem to be influenced much more by information related to their competence than are evaluations of men. I also find that competence as portrayed by the composition of a candidate’s facial features does not alter this relationship. My findings suggest that gender-based stereotypes may have an indirect effect on candidate evaluations and vote choice by influencing how voters react to information about them.
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Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump
Jonathan Rothwell
Gallup Working Paper, August 2016
Abstract:
The 2016 US presidential nominee Donald Trump has broken with the policies of previous Republican Party presidents on trade, immigration, and war, in favor of a more nationalist and populist platform. Using detailed Gallup survey data for a large number of American adults, I analyze the individual and geographic factors that predict a higher probability of viewing Trump favorably and contrast the results with those found for other candidates. The results show mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support. His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations, but they earn relative high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support. There is stronger evidence that racial isolation and less strictly economic measures of social status, namely health and intergenerational mobility, are robustly predictive of more favorable views toward Trump, and these factors predict support for him but not other Republican presidential candidates.
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Predicting and Interpolating State-Level Polls Using Twitter Textual Data
Nicholas Beauchamp
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Spatially or temporally dense polling remains both difficult and expensive using existing survey methods. In response, there have been increasing efforts to approximate various survey measures using social media, but most of these approaches remain methodologically flawed. To remedy these flaws, this article combines 1,200 state-level polls during the 2012 presidential campaign with over 100 million state-located political tweets; models the polls as a function of the Twitter text using a new linear regularization feature-selection method; and shows via out-of-sample testing that when properly modeled, the Twitter-based measures track and to some degree predict opinion polls, and can be extended to unpolled states and potentially substate regions and subday timescales. An examination of the most predictive textual features reveals the topics and events associated with opinion shifts, sheds light on more general theories of partisan difference in attention and information processing, and may be of use for real-time campaign strategy.
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Recruitment and Perceptions of Gender Bias in Party Leader Support
Daniel Butler & Jessica Robinson Preece
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gender differences in who gets recruited by political party elites contribute to women’s underrepresentation on the ballot, but recent evidence suggests that even when women are recruited to the same extent as men, they are still less likely to be interested in seeking office. Why do men and women respond differently to invitations to seek office? We hypothesize that women view party recruitment as a weaker signal of informal support than men do. We use a survey experiment on a sample of 3,640 elected municipal officeholders — themselves prospective recruits for higher office — to test this. We find that female respondents generally believe party leaders will provide female recruits less strategic and financial support than male recruits. In other words, even when elites recruit women, women are skeptical that party leaders will use their political and social capital on their behalf. This difference may account for many women’s lukewarm responses to recruitment.
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Ideologically Sophisticated Donors: Which Candidates Do Individual Contributors Finance?
Michael Barber, Brandice Canes-Wrone & Sharece Thrower
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals are the single largest source of campaign contributions, yet we know little about their motivations. For instance, the existing literature questions whether individual contributors sophisticatedly differentiate among candidates according to policy positions, particularly among same-party candidates. We analyze this issue by combining data from a new survey of over 2,800 in- and out-of-state donors associated with the 2012 Senate elections, FEC data on contributors’ professions, and legislative records. Three major findings emerge. First, policy agreement between a donor's positions and a senator's roll calls significantly influences the likelihood of giving, even for same-party contributors. Second, there is a significant effect of committee membership corresponding to a donor's occupation; this holds even for donors who claim that other motivations dominate, but it does not appear to be motivated by an expectation of access. Third, conditional upon a donation occurring, its size is determined by factors outside a legislator's control.
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When Politics Is a Woman’s Game: Party and Gender Ownership in Woman-Versus-Woman Elections
Lindsey Meeks & David Domke
Communication Research, October 2016, Pages 895-921
Abstract:
Research on the interplay of gender and political party in voters’ candidate evaluations has long focused on all-male elections and more recently on mixed-gender elections. This study takes the next theoretical step and focuses on woman-versus-woman elections. Specifically, we examine political party- and gender-based “ownerships” of political issues and character traits in the context of female-only elections. With an experimental design, adult participants were randomly assigned to read news articles that presented either two Republican or two Democratic women competing for Governor. Candidates were presented as “owning” stereotypically masculine or feminine issues and traits. Findings show that self-identified Democrats and Republicans eschewed the so-called masculine candidate, and preferred instead a partisan woman who created a gender balance of masculinity and femininity.
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Mirya Holman & Monica Schneider
Politics, Groups, and Identities, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political institutions in the U.S. continue to be dominated by men. Media and scholarly accounts often focus on how demand factors, such as political parties and elite networks, and supply factors, such as women’s self-confidence and political interest, combine to depress women’s representation. Yet, we know little about whether these narratives matter for women’s political ambition or how they might influence women of color. We demonstrate that blaming women’s underrepresentation on supply vs. demand causes clear changes in women’s political ambition. Attributing women’s lack of parity to demand factors allows white and Asian women to “discount” the possibility that failure rests on their own abilities, thus increasing women’s political ambition. Alternatively, framing women’s underrepresentation as due to supply factors depresses white and Asian women’s political ambition possibly because of stereotype threat. Black women respond in an opposite manner, with depressed political ambition in demand scenarios, while Latinas are unaffected by these narratives. Our findings contribute to understanding how frames intersect with racial and ethnic identity to influence political ambition.
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National Forces in State Legislative Elections
Steven Rogers
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2016, Pages 207-225
Abstract:
The race for the White House is at the top of the ticket, but voters will also choose more than 5,000 state legislators in November 2016. While voters elect and hold the president responsible for one job and state legislators for another, the outcomes of their elections are remarkably related. In analyses of elite and voter behavior in state legislative elections, I show that legislators affiliated with the president’s party — especially during unpopular presidencies — are the most likely to be challenged, and compared with individual assessments of the state legislature, changes in presidential approval have at least three times the impact on voters’ decision-making in state legislative elections. Thus, while state legislatures wield considerable policymaking power, legislators’ electoral fates appear to be largely out of their control.
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Mary Walsh et al.
Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the present study we examine gender stereotyping in the traits and images emphasized by candidates in state judicial campaigns. Content analyses were conducted on televised campaign advertisements from state supreme court contests in election years 2008–2010. Our analyses indicate that women referenced masculine traits and were shown with masculine images in their ads more than men. In addition, the gender makeup of the race made a difference; when running against a man, women stress intelligence and being hardworking more than men. Conversely, women mentioned experience to a high degree when running against other women.
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David Clementson, Paola Pascual-Ferrá & Michael Beatty
Presidential Studies Quarterly, September 2016, Pages 592–617
Abstract:
Presidential candidates use different language intensity in different situations. However, the literature is unclear as to when they should use low- or high-intensity language. We applied language expectancy theory and Edwards’ theory of presidential influence to situations varying in circumstances during a presidential campaign. Results indicated significant interactions between language intensity and economic conditions. In support of theories of persuasion applied to presidential campaign contexts, the effects of language intensity and circumstances each depend on the other. During exigent economic times, people consider a presidential candidate to have more presidentiality and trustworthiness when using high- instead of low-intensity language. And during stable economic times, people consider a presidential candidate to have more presidentiality and trustworthiness when using low- instead of high-intensity language.
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Talk “Like a Man”: The Linguistic Styles of Hillary Clinton, 1992–2013
Jennifer Jones
Perspectives on Politics, September 2016, Pages 625-642
Abstract:
Hillary Clinton is arguably the most prominent woman in American politics today. Past research suggests female politicians conform to masculine communication styles in an attempt to evade the “double bind.” Clinton’s long and varied career thus provides an important and useful case study for investigating how female politicians present themselves strategically. Drawing on research in political psychology, political communication, social psychology, and linguistics I examine whether Clinton talked “like a man” as she navigated a path toward political leadership by conducting a quantitative textual analysis of 567 interview transcripts and candidate debates between 1992–2013. Results on Clinton’s linguistic style suggest her language grew increasingly masculine over time, as her involvement and power in politics expanded. I also consider Clinton’s language in the context of her 2007–2008 presidential campaign. In 2007, Clinton’s linguistic style was consistently masculine, supporting widespread accounts of Clinton’s campaign strategy. Beginning in late 2007, however, Clinton’s language became more feminine, reflecting a shift in the self-presentational strategies advised by her campaign staff. Throughout the 2008 campaign period, Clinton’s language fluctuated dramatically from one interview to the next, reflecting a candidate — and campaign — in crisis. This study reveals hidden insight into the strategies Clinton used as she navigated through the labyrinth toward leadership. Changes in Clinton’s linguistic style reflect the performance of gendered roles, expectations of political leaders, and the masculine norms of behavior that permeate political institutions.
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Daniel Kling & Thomas Stratmann
George Mason University Working Paper, August 2016
Abstract:
We document the effectiveness of robo calls for increasing voter participation despite most published research finding little or no effect of automated calls. We establish this finding in a large field experiment in a targeted, partisan get-out-the-vote campaign. Our experimental design includes a follow-up call, which allows us to control for selection effects. We identify subsets of subjects, for whom the treatment effects are substantially larger than those that are found in previous studies. Our findings show that robo calls can cause up to a one percentage point increase in voter turnout. Additionally, our experimental design allows for testing how the number of calls in a treatment, that is dosage, affects voter turnout. Here, results show that that a few extra calls increase the treatment effect, and that many additional calls decrease that effect.
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Aaron Weinschenk & Costas Panagopoulos
Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, forthcoming
Abstract:
We ask whether and how US presidential nominating conventions matter in contemporary US elections. Using individual-level panel data, we find evidence that the conventions exert important effects on the electorate by influencing post-convention intentions to participate in electoral politics, knowledge about the candidates, and candidate favorability ratings, even after controlling for pre-convention intentions, knowledge, and candidate ratings. We conclude that conventions remain important campaign events that play a role in facilitating democratic processes in America.
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Turnout, Status, and Identity: Mobilizing Latinos to Vote with Group Appeals
Ali Valenzuela & Melissa Michelson
American Political Science Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The rise of micro-targeting in American elections raises new questions about the effects of identity-based mobilization strategies. While prior research has found either weak or null effects of identity messages targeting minority groups, we bring together theories of expressive voting with literature on racial and ethnic identification to argue that prior studies have missed a crucial moderating variable — identity strength — that varies across both individuals and communities. Identity appeals can have powerful effects on turnout, but only when they target politicized identities to which individuals hold strong prior attachments. Using two innovative GOTV field experiments that rely on publicly available data to proxy for identity strength, we show that the effects of both ethnic and national identity appeals among Latinos in California and Texas are conditional on the strength of those identities in different communities and among different Latino subgroups.
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Learning and Coordination in the Presidential Primary System
George Deltas, Helios Herrera & Mattias Polborn
Review of Economic Studies, October 2016, Pages 1544-1578
Abstract:
In elections with three or more candidates, coordination among like-minded voters is an important problem. We analyse the trade-off between coordination and learning about candidate quality under different temporal election systems in the context of the U.S. presidential primary system. In our model, candidates with different policy positions and qualities compete for the nomination, and voters are uncertain about the candidates' valence. This setup generates two effects: vote splitting (i.e. several candidates in the same policy position compete for the same voter pool) and voter learning (as the results in earlier elections help voters to update their beliefs on candidate quality). Sequential voting minimizes vote splitting in late districts, but voters may coordinate on a low-quality candidate. Using the parameter estimates obtained from all the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries during 2000–12, we conduct policy experiments such as replacing the current system with a simultaneous system, adopting the reform proposal of the National Association of Secretaries of State, or imposing party rules that lead to candidate withdrawal when prespecified conditions are met.