Explaining the Paradox of Issue Convergence: A Closer Look at the Content and Strategy of Campaign Messaging

Abstract

The most prominent theories about how candidates choose which issues to emphasize share a common prediction, that candidates will prime favorable issues in order to raise their salience, but fail to explain why competing candidates so often discuss the same issues. I propose the candidates may also seek to make already-salient issues more favorable, by framing them in terms of their most positive aspects and providing information to voters about their positions and competence on these issues. To test predictions about when candidates will use these alternative strategies, I introduce an original dataset which measures the discussion of issues on the websites of more than 200 major-party US Senate candidates between 2002 and 2008. I demonstrate that candidates choose which strategies to employ based upon their own characteristics as well as the electoral context, providing strong evidence that campaigns serve a far broader purpose than simply to prime certain issues. These findings offer a starkly different perspective on issue emphasis than that of previous researchers, and offer a framework for future studies to develop a much more accurate view of political campaigns.