Findings

The Place for Politics

Kevin Lewis

February 24, 2011

The wellsprings of candidate emergence: Geographic origins of statewide candidacies in the United States

James Gimpel, Frances Lee & Rebecca Thorpe
Political Geography, January 2011, Pages 25-37

Abstract:
Candidates and nominees for statewide office in the United States do not emerge from random locations within states. In this paper, we argue that densely populated areas are more likely to both foster political ambition and to afford the resources that enable candidates to wage an effective campaign. Candidates and nominees for major statewide office originate from populous counties in numbers significantly out of proportion to these counties' share of their state's population. Meanwhile, aspirants virtually never emerge out of rural areas or small towns. The pattern holds for all candidates and nominees for both Senate and governor and for both major political parties. Regional biases are more pronounced for institutionally strong gubernatorial offices than for weak offices and among high quality nominees for statewide office than among inexperienced candidates. Given the importance of urban/rural cleavages in the American electorate, these findings raise fundamental questions about political representation.

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Momentum and Social Learning in Presidential Primaries

Brian Knight & Nathan Schiff
Journal of Political Economy, December 2010, Pages 1110-1150

Abstract:
This paper investigates social learning in sequential voting systems. In the econometric model, candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations. The empirical application uses daily polling data from the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean. Owing to these momentum effects, early voters had up to five times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, and this helps to explain the distribution of advertising expenditures. Finally, we use the estimated model to conduct two counterfactual experiments.

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Pornography-seeking behaviors following midterm political elections in the United States: A replication of the challenge hypothesis

Patrick Markey & Charlotte Markey
Computers in Human Behavior, forthcoming

Abstract:
The current study examined a prediction derived from the challenge hypothesis; individuals who vicariously win a competition of rank order will seek out pornography relatively more often than individuals who vicariously lose a competition. By examining Google keyword searches during the 2006 and 2010 midterm elections in the United States, the relative popularity of various pornography keyword searches was computed for each state and the District of Columbia the week after each midterm election. Consistent with previous research examining presidential elections and the challenge hypothesis, individuals located in traditionally Republican states tended to search for pornography keywords relatively more often after the 2010 midterm election (a Republican victory) than after the 2006 midterm election (a Democratic victory). Conversely, individuals located in traditionally Democratic states tended to search for pornography relatively less often following the 2010 midterm election than they did following the 2006 midterm election.

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The Persuasive Effects of Direct Mail: A Regression Discontinuity Based Approach

Alan Gerber, Daniel Kessler & Marc Meredith
Journal of Politics, January 2011, Pages 140-155

Abstract:
During the contest for Kansas attorney general in 2006, an organization sent out six pieces of mail criticizing the incumbent's conduct in office. We exploit a discontinuity in the rule used to select which households received the mailings to identify the causal effect of mail on vote choice and voter turnout. We find these mailings had a politically significant effect on the challenger's vote share, which is statistically significant in most, but not all, of our specifications. Our point estimates suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in the amount of mail sent to a precinct increased the challenger's vote share by 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points. Furthermore, our results suggest that these mailings had little mobilizing effect, suggesting that the mechanism for this increase was persuasion.

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Variability in Citizens' Reactions to Different Types of Negative Campaigns

Kim Fridkin & Patrick Kenney
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming

Abstract:
Do negative advertisements lower voters' evaluations of the targeted candidate? We theorize that there is much to be gained by examining the variance in the content and tone of negative campaign messages and the variance in voters' sensitivity to negative political rhetoric. We employ data from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to investigate the impact of negative campaigning in U.S. Senate campaigns. We sampled 1,045 respondents in 21 of the 28 U.S. Senate races featuring a majority party incumbent and challenger. In addition to the survey data, we collected contextual data regarding the political advertisements aired during the campaigns and the news coverage of these campaigns in state newspapers. The evidence suggests that the impact of negative information is multifaceted, and under some circumstances, substantial. We find that uncivil and relevant negative messages are the most powerful, especially for people with less tolerance for negative political rhetoric.

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When Candidates Value Good Character: A Spatial Model with Applications to Congressional Elections

James Adams, Samuel Merrill, Elizabeth Simas & Walter Stone
Journal of Politics, January 2011, Pages 17-30

Abstract:
We add to the literature that examines the relationship between candidate valence and policy strategies by arguing that candidates intrinsically value both the policies and the personal character of the winning candidate. In making this argument, we distinguish between two dimensions of candidate valence: strategic valence refers to factors such as name recognition, fundraising ability, and campaigning skills, while character valence is composed of qualities that voters and candidates intrinsically value in office holders, including integrity, competence, and diligence. Our model considers challengers who value both the policies and the character-based valence of the incumbent and assumes that the incumbent's policy position is fixed by prior commitments. Under these conditions, we show that challengers who are superior to the incumbent in their character-based valence have incentives to moderate their policy positions. We report empirical tests of this good-government result of our model, using data on the 2006 congressional elections.

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Anticipating Entry: Major Party Positioning and Third Party Threat

Daniel Lee
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming

Abstract:
Observers of U.S. elections have reason to believe that third parties are not relevant political actors since they rarely win many votes or influence which major party wins an election. Researchers should use dependent variables besides vote choice and vote share to find third party effects that are a normal aspect of the American two-party system. A spatial model of elections motivates the hypothesis that a higher likelihood of third party entry induces greater major party candidate divergence. An empirical test that uses candidate positioning data in the 1996 U.S. House elections provides evidence of this third party effect.

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The Search Is On: Googling "Barack Obama" and "Hillary Clinton" in the 2008 Democratic Primary

John Balz
Journal of Political Marketing, January 2011, Pages 139-164

Abstract:
The 2008 Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was the longest primary campaign in history and one of the most intensive in recent memory. Besides following the campaign through traditional media like newspapers, radio, and television, more Americans turned to the Internet actively searching for information about the candidates. In this article, the author analyzes search traffic data for Obama and Clinton over the course of the primary to revisit the classic "minimal effects" hypothesis about campaigns. This hypothesis, first voiced in the 1940s and 1950s, argues that campaigns have only small marginal effects on citizens vote choices. The author tests a weaker version of this hypothesis, asking whether campaigns positively affect a kind of political engagement that he terms active online engagement. Using a statistical model, he compares online search traffic in the month before an election against the month after. He finds support for the hypothesis that campaigns spark political engagement by an average of about 50 percent over the general level of political interest in a given state. He also finds evidence contrary to the popular wisdom of the 2008 campaign that Hillary Clinton ran a poor race. In fact, the author finds that her campaign had more influence in engaging people online, although the overall levels of search traffic remained below that of Obama. Put simply: Hillary Clinton ran a solid campaign against an unusually popular opponent.

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The Role of Candidate Traits in Campaigns

Kim Fridkin & Patrick Kenney
Journal of Politics, January 2011, Pages 61-73

Abstract:
We examine how candidates shape citizens' impressions of their personal traits during U.S. Senate campaigns. We look at the personality traits emphasized by candidates in their controlled communications and in news coverage of their campaigns. We couple information about campaign messages with a unique survey dataset allowing us to examine voters' understanding and evaluations of the candidates' personalities. We find that messages from the news media influence people's willingness to rate the candidates on trait dimensions. In addition, negative trait messages emanating from challengers and the press shape citizens' impressions of incumbents. In contrast, voters' evaluations of challengers are unmoved by campaign messages, irrespective of the source or tone of the communications. Finally, we find citizens rely heavily on traits when evaluating competing candidates in U.S. Senate campaigns, even controlling for voters' party, ideological, and issue preferences.

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Why primaries? The party's tradeoff between policy and valence

Gilles Serra
Journal of Theoretical Politics, January 2011, Pages 21-51

Abstract:
Our theory studies why and when political parties choose to hold competitive primary elections. Party leaders can decide the nomination by granting resources and endorsements to a chosen candidate. Alternatively, they can delegate the candidate selection to the party's rank and file by holding a primary election among multiple candidates. The benefit of a primary is to increase the expected valence of the nominee. Its cost is the ideology that primary voters might induce on the party's policy platform. We find that primary elections are more likely to be used when the potential primary voters are not too moderate and not too extremist. We also find that opposition parties and weak parties benefit from primaries more than incumbent parties and strong parties do. Intriguingly, extremist parties are more likely to adopt primaries than centrist parties are. Contradicting previous research, we find that primaries are more attractive when candidates' skills are less salient for voters than candidates' policies.

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Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates in 2008: A Profile of Audience Composition

Kate Kenski & Kathleen Hall Jamieson
American Behavioral Scientist, March 2011, Pages 307-324

Abstract:
In this study, the authors examine the composition of the audiences for the presidential and vice presidential debates in 2008. Results from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey show that the size of the vice presidential debate-viewing audience in 2008 exceeded the sizes of the presidential debate-viewing audiences, which is atypical from prior campaign seasons. The same general demographic and political characteristics that have driven political debate viewing in the past were operative during the 2008 presidential and vice presidential debate season, with debate viewing by Blacks being a notable exception. Contrary to our predictions, females were not more likely than males to watch the vice presidential debate. Debate watching was significantly associated with the favorability ratings of the candidates on the Democratic ticket, but it was not associated with the ratings of the Republican nominees.

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Protecting Minorities in Large Binary Elections: A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data

Alessandra Casella, Shuky Ehrenberg, Andrew Gelman & Jie Shen
B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, October 2010

Abstract:
The legitimacy of democratic systems requires the protection of minority preferences while ideally treating every voter equally. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we asked voters to rank the importance of different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available - a simple version of Storable Votes. We then constructed distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes and estimated the probable impact of the bonus vote through bootstrapping techniques. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one contest with 15-30 percent probability; when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85-95 percent probability. The paper makes two contributions: it tests the performance of storable votes in a setting where preferences were not controlled, and it suggests the use of bootstrapping techniques when appropriate replications of the data cannot be obtained.

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Election Night's Alright for Fighting: The Role of Emotions in Political Participation

Nicholas Valentino et al.
Journal of Politics, January 2011, Pages 156-170

Abstract:
A large literature has established a persistent association between the skills and resources citizens possess and their likelihood of participating in politics. However, the short-term motivational forces that cause citizens to employ those skills and expend resources in one election but not the next have only recently received attention. Findings in political psychology suggest specific emotions may play an important role in mobilization, but the question of "which emotions play what role?" remains an important area of debate. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory and the Affective Intelligence model, we predict that anger, more than anxiety or enthusiasm, will mobilize. We find evidence for the distinctive influence of anger in a randomized experiment, a national survey of the 2008 electorate, and in pooled American National Election Studies from 1980 to 2004.

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"Personal Influence": Social Context and Political Competition

Andrea Galeotti & Andrea Mattozzi
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2011, Pages 307-327

Abstract:
This paper studies the effect of social learning on political outcomes in a model of informative campaign advertising. Voters' communication network affects parties' incentives to disclose political information, voters' learning about candidates running for office, and polarization of the electoral outcome. In richer communication networks, parties disclose less political information and voters are more likely to possess erroneous beliefs about the characteristics of the candidates. In turn, a richer communication network among voters may lead to political polarization. These results are reinforced when interpersonal communication occurs more frequently among ideologically homogeneous individuals and parties can target political advertising.

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The Voting Behavior of Young Disenfranchised Felons: Would They Vote if They Could?

Randi Hjalmarsson & Mark Lopez
American Law and Economics Review, Fall 2010, Pages 265-279

Abstract:
This paper utilizes two nationally representative surveys to study the voting behavior of young adult criminals. We find significant differences in voter turnout and registration rates of criminals and noncriminals. According to the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, just 26% of ever incarcerated individuals voted in the 2004 Presidential election; these individuals were thirty-one percentage points less likely to vote than nonincarcerated individuals. Regressions of voting on arrest and incarceration and a large set of observable characteristics indicate that analyses based on data sets excluding measures of criminal history will overestimate voter turnout rates by six to nineteen percentage points.

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Campaigning for Congress in the "9/11" Era: Considerations of Gender and Party in Response to an Exogenous Shock

Patricia Strach & Virginia Sapiro
American Politics Research, forthcoming

Abstract:
This article takes advantage of a naturally occurring experiment to examine how congressional campaign advertising responds to dramatic events. Integrating the literatures on issue ownership and gender stereotypes, we ask how campaign rhetoric and substance changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, paying particular attention to how those responses were mediated by party and gender expectations. Using data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project (WiscAds) of all ad-airings (not merely ads created) in the top 75 to 100 media markets in 2000 and 2002, we find that campaigns stepped up issues relevant to 9/11 consistent with party- and gender-based issue ownership. Republican men gave more attention to the military than any other group and more attention to foreign affairs than Democratic men or women. However, most noteworthy was the dramatic increase in the symbolic use of the flag for all candidates.

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Riding the Waves of Money: Contribution Dynamics in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaign

Dino Christenson & Corwin Smidt
Journal of Political Marketing, January 2011, Pages 4-26

Abstract:
The 2008 primary was the most nuanced and expensive nomination contest in history. We investigate how this massive battle for contributions played out over 2007 and the first half of 2008 by analyzing the daily dynamics of candidate contributions using the Federal Elections Commission's collection of individual contributions. Not surprisingly, Giuliani and Clinton were the leaders in contribution momentum during the latter parts of the so-called money primary. This pattern abruptly changed in 2008 as both parties experienced a structural change in contribution flows. While Iowa and New Hampshire placements helped their causes, the South Carolina primary was by far the most rewarding early contest for Obama and McCain. Furthermore, primary victories do not benefit all candidates equally, as Clinton and Huckabee gained far less than their counterparts in response to their early victories.

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Facing the Voters: The Potential Impact of Ballot Paper Photographs in British Elections

Robert Johns & Mark Shephard
Political Studies, forthcoming

Abstract:
A growing body of literature has found that photographs of politicians can influence electoral preferences. In this article we assess whether candidates rating higher on electoral attractiveness perform better in a series of hypothetical elections, and whether their advantage is magnified when their appearance is printed not only on campaign materials but also on ballot papers. We find that candidate appearance only had a significant impact on vote choice when photographs were printed on ballot papers, and even then there was an impact on only some of the elections, notably those pitting male against female candidates. Photographs had most impact on the choices of those least interested in politics and least likely to vote, and magnified a tendency (among voters of all ages) to favour younger candidates and to penalise older candidates. Findings suggest that the addition of photographs to ballot papers could affect the outcomes of marginal British constituency races.

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Estimation of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects from Randomized Experiments, with Application to the Optimal Planning of the Get-Out-the-Vote Campaign

Kosuke Imai & Aaron Strauss
Political Analysis, Winter 2011, Pages 1-19

Abstract:
Although a growing number of political scientists are conducting randomized experiments, many of them only report the average treatment effects and do not systematically explore the variation in treatment effects across subpopulations. This is unfortunate from a scientific point of view because heterogeneous treatment effects can provide additional substantive insights. This current state of affairs is also problematic from a policy makers' perspective since such studies do not identify subgroups for which treatments are effective. In this paper, we propose a formal two-step framework that first identifies heterogeneous treatment effects from a randomized experiment and then uses this information to derive an optimal policy about which treatment should be given to whom. Our proposed method avoids the risk of false discoveries that are likely in post hoc subgroup analysis routinely conducted in the discipline. We discuss our methodology in the context of get-out-the-vote randomized field experiments and show how the proposed two-step framework can be applied in real-world settings.

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Did Social Media Really Matter? College Students' Use of Online Media and Political Decision Making in the 2008 Election

Matthew James Kushin & Masahiro Yamamoto
Mass Communication and Society, November 2010, Pages 608-630

Abstract:
This study examined college students' use of online media for political purposes in the 2008 election. Social media attention, online expression, and traditional Internet attention were assessed in relation to political self-efficacy and situational political involvement. Data from a Web survey of college students showed significant positive relationships between attention to traditional Internet sources and political self-efficacy and situational political involvement. Attention to social media was not significantly related to political self-efficacy or involvement. Online expression was significantly related to situational political involvement but not political self-efficacy. Implications are discussed for political use of online media for young adults.


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