Actual Campaign Research Articles

Collaboration as Innovative Teaching and Learning Strategy: A Case Study of Integrated Marketing Communication (COM2014) for Quality Education Sustainability (SDG4)

This paper explores a course taught by School of Arts at Sunway University Malaysia, for second year Bachelor of Communication and Bachelor of Advertising and Branding students. The course focuses on planning and executing marketing campaign using various communication channels like the social media. The assessments given are coursework based and no final examination as it is believed that courseworks are able to measure a greater range of abilities than exam (Kniveton, 1996). Besides, coursework marks are a better predictor of long-term learning of course than exams (Gibbs & Simpson, 2004). This is due to the experience they gained from conducting the coursework will enable students to practice the knowledge in their work-life. This paper is case study research done by the instructor herself, after teaching this course for several years, and changed the assessment to suits the up-to-date market demand. Collaboration for the course was signed in a Memorandum of Understanding to give students opportunity of full experience in running actual campaigns with the university’s industry partner, Sunway Malls because collaboration will be an essential skill for students this era (Redecker et al., 2011). Assessments were improvised as literature shows that as a teacher, the lecturer can alter those approaches in her curriculum mix when evidence says they are not working (Pearson, 2003). Researcher used systematic literature review to reveal the investigation, followed by action research approach, through observation and interviews data collection. The results showed several constructs like communication, collaboration, and coordination importance for the sustainability of education, including the course COM2014.

Consumer risk perception and behavior change intentions

This manuscript addresses behavior change intentions and consumer risk perceptions in the context of uncertainty and crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the theory of planned behavior and health behavior theories, a conceptual framework is developed that focuses on the role of attitudes toward the Covid-19 pandemic, their determinants in the context of the public campaign conducted, and the resulting behavior change intentions. The empirical study, based on an actual campaign and a representative nationwide sample in a developing country, is conducted to test the developed hypotheses. The results suggest that information search is relevant to predicting attitudes and intention to change behavior. At the same time, exposure to the campaign is directly relevant to motivating the target audience to change their behavior. There is also a gap between attitude and behavior, but it is bridged by perceived risk, which plays a vital moderating role when rated high or low. Finally, in the presence of this moderating effect, an indirect effect of information search on behavior change intention is confirmed by attitudes toward the Covid-19 pandemic. Overall, this study provides valuable insights for research in health behavior and crisis management.

The program-to-campaign linkage: Party organization and ideological inconsistency during election campaigns

What determines party strategies in the short run during election campaigns? In this paper, I highlight a novel aspect of party behavior pertaining to the connection between election programs and actual campaign statements issued by party elites in the media. I argue that party leaders may feel compelled to fine-tune their rhetoric and stances during campaigns and thus deviate from their party’s election programs. Nonetheless, their ability to conduct ad-hoc adaptations is limited. The theory I propose posits that two features of party organizations will determine if party leaders can engage in short-term inconsistencies. First, membership-dominated parties will be less likely to be inconsistent because their leaders will fear alienating (the strong) party members and getting punished as a result. Second, parties with strong societal integration—those that maintain strong ties with society and an extensive network of local branches—are more likely to indulge in ideological inconsistency because they establish close bonds with voters based on problem-solving rather than broad ideological principles. I test these dynamics in 14 European democracies between 1972 and 2017 and find strong empirical support. The findings show that intricate party organizations and robust connections with normal citizens influence parties’ short-term strategies during election campaigns.

Investigating the Cost of Election in Nigeria: The 2019 General Election in Focus

Political party funding is an important issue for all global key players in democratic accountability and transparency. One of the areas where the phenomenon is attracting interest is Nigeria. The 2019 General Election represents an important period for the study of party financing in Nigeria. This study critically examines the cost of an election in Nigeria from four perspectives: the cost of nominations, the cost of party primaries, the cost of the actual campaign, and the cost of running the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The study collected data using a qualitative research design that employed the tools of key informant interviews and focus group discussions. The data collected were analysed and interpreted using thematic descriptive qualitative discussions. The study uncovers that the cost of an election in Nigeria is exorbitant and unbearable and the most disturbing aspect is the illegality involved in terms of the violation of maximum spending limit, the use of state resources, and setting a price of nomination above the reach of the common and average man. Thus, it is recommended among others that a strict regulatory sanction and monitoring form compliance should be applied appropriately.

The nature and impact of emotional content in congressional candidate emails to supporters

Previous research suggests that appeals to anger and enthusiasm increase voter participation but decrease deliberation and openness to persuasion, while appeals to anxiety increase information-seeking and deliberation but not participation. Thus, campaigns have incentives to consider the emotional nature of their communications with voters and to differentiate distinct emotions that share valence categories. We examine the emotional content of emails sent by candidates for the US House to partisan supporters and test the effects of these appeals on voter behavior. Overall, emails contain more enthusiasm and anger relative to a set of political “letters to the editor” drawn from major US newspapers and, in some cases, relative to a set of randomly generated “pseudo-emails” based on word frequency in typical discourse. We do not, however, find any consistent differences in emotional language across candidate or campaign factors, such as incumbency and competitiveness. In a unique quasi-experimental study fielded during the 2018 election, using actual campaign emails, we also find little evidence that the emotional content of campaign communications influences citizens. This is true regardless of whether we measure emotional content using objective codings or subjective judgments by human coders. We discuss methodological difficulties encountered in our work and possible lessons for future research on this topic.

Priorities of the Ukraine’s public diplomacy in the early 2020s

The purpose of the Ukraine’s public diplomacy, like those of other countries, is led by a strong objective to reach out to foreign publics to secure its national interests. The article contemplates the public diplomacy of Ukraine such as being at the present stage of its further formation, alongside a focus on the main priorities and basic preferences among the scope of activities considered in the various legislative acts and laws. The number of the documents, on the basis of which the norms of the Ukrainian public diplomacy are stationed, are indicated thoroughly. Regarding the foregoing, the aim is to identify the most important areas of the Ukrainian public diplomacy, involving the press, taking into account trends and events in the world that diverse and expand to the future. All over the text, the author assigns high priority to the role of the mass media in its transmission of the essential feedback about the state and the development of the image of Ukraine according to a public thought abroad. With the help of mass media, Ukraine use various instruments of public communication to establish trust between her and more well-off governments in the West. The author points out the need for close cooperation between diplomats and the press during the actual campaigns that vary and the events within the public diplomacy. This resulted in the issue of a research conclusions made by the author, collecting together the ideas that have been made during the investigation. Among the numerous directions set by the MFA of Ukraine and other government intuitions, the main priorities of the public diplomacy in the early 2020ies can be divided into three categories. They are: improving Ukraine’s image abroad; revealing its individuality in the dynamics of cultural transformations; and creating a positive narratives for a public image of Ukraine for the global audience.

Book Review of “Hidden Persuasion”: 33 Psychological Influence Techniques in Advertising

“Hidden Persuasion”: 33 psychological influence techniques in advertising by Andrews, van Leeuwen, and van Baaren has demonstrated that the book has great insight to offer. Its potential audience ranges from the public who can learn hidden advertising techniques to undergraduate students interested in learning more about the techniques from actual campaigns. The book is full of real examples and principles that were written interestingly and cohesively. Its layout and guideline to use the book in a different setting make the book unique and worth reading. Even with some room for improvement, the authors did a great job of making the book enjoyable and educational for various audiences.

Constituency building: Determining consumers’ willingness to participate in corporate political activities

Recently, firms have increasingly approached their own customers for assistance with corporate political activities—a strategy known as constituency building. While constituency building efforts targeting shareholders and employees have been well-studied, relatively little is known about the impact of approaching consumers. Hence, this paper examines why consumers participate in corporate political activities on behalf of a brand, and we present three studies to explore this increasingly popular practice. First, Study 1 utilizes qualitative interviews with actual campaign participants to provide initial insights to develop our theoretical model, which we subsequently test in two experiments. Study 2 finds that brand loyalty is a key driver of consumer activism, with both direct and indirect effects through its impact on issue salience, information seeking behavior, and its interaction with the issue type. Finally, Study 3 finds that consumer activism is associated with increased brand loyalty, indicating that this may be a relationship building activity and an important dimension of the longer process of social exchange between the brand and consumer.

The genesis of IT tools in making management decisions of the university admission committee

The article discusses the issue of the dynamics of changes in IT tools that have been and are used to make management decisions in the work of the university admission committee. The main directions of the work of the admission committee are highlighted: organizational and methodological, technological, the actual admission campaign and generalization, as the final stage at which the results of the admission campaign are summed up. The features of each of the directions are highlighted and the IT tools that were used for them are indicated. It is shown that over the past two decades, IT tools have undergone drastic changes, which are associated with an increase in the functionality of the admission committee. Arguments are given in support of the thesis that the solution for automating the management activities of the university, in particular for the admission campaign, over the past years has been a domestic software on the 1C:Enterprise platform — the 1C:University system. The article presents the stage-by-stage coordination of the admission campaign — from planning and forming the required list of documents (application of the applicant, receipt, examination sheets) to processing information about entrance examinations and USE results, forming enrollment orders. It is shown that the 1C:University system occupies an important place in the automation of many processes taking place in the admission office of the university. Online services that are important for the organization of the admission campaign are described.

Testing-the-Waters Policy With Hypothetical Investment: Evidence From Equity Crowdfunding

Digitization has enabled “testing-the-waters” in entrepreneurial finance whereby investors can make nonbinding commitments in equity crowdfunding prior to an actual campaign to ascertain interest in the project. We consider whether these nonbinding equity investment commitments are informative about actual investments during the campaign and, thus, ultimate startup funding success. The data indicate that only 18% of nonbinding commitments are, in fact, invested. The evidence is consistent with hypothetical bias. Hypothetical bias is significantly less pronounced among women and among investors living in higher income areas or in areas with higher levels of education. While investment intentions are only partially reliable at the individual level, the aggregate amount of collected investment intentions is a strong predictor of campaign success. We investigate alternative reasons for withdrawals, such as lying and informational motives, both of which we find implausible alternatives to hypothetical bias.

Reading the Fine Print: Issue Advertisements and the Persuasive Effects of Campaign Finance Disclosures

There is an expectation among practitioners that advertising disclosures work to inform voters about who is speaking and whether they should trust the information in the advertisement. However, existing research suggests that current disclosure regulations may not perform as reformers expect. These studies indicate that voters may be deceived by strategically chosen interest group names that falsely project knowledge or trustworthiness. In this study, I measure how actual campaign names and interest groups are perceived by individuals in terms of their knowledge and trustworthiness. I then experimentally vary the campaign finance disclosure within a ballot initiative advertisement to see how these disclosures affect respondents’ issue preferences. This study found that in some cases, there was no difference between an advertisement with no disclosure and one with a veiled disclosure message. In other cases, this level of disclosure reduced support for the issue. In most cases, respondents appear to condition their support on the credibility of the campaign donor disclosed. In some cases, respondents are deceived by the perceived credibility of campaign names when less comprehensive disclosure is used.

Water Aroused the Girls’ Hearts: Gendering Water and Soil Conservation in 1950s China

This article contributes to recent efforts to demonstrate the significance of gender in shaping human-environment interactions through an in-depth study of a model collective in the water and soil conservation campaigns that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched during the early 1950s. Dengjiabao village in Gansu province’s Wushan county earned nationwide recognition in these state-led efforts to check erosion, prevent downstream sedimentation, and boost agricultural production in Northwest China’s Loess Plateau. The state-sponsored publications that praised Dengjiabao’s achievements in the first decade of the PRC presented conservation in distinctly gendered terms. Propaganda materials asserted that improvements in environmental conditions and standards of living achieved through conservation efforts would reconfigure gender relations by enabling unmarried men in poor, resource-starved villages like Dengjiabao to find wives. But during the actual campaigns, as oral history interviews and local archives make evident, rural women had to balance the heavy physical labor of transforming the landscape with household work responsibilities. Water and soil conservation depended on the female workforce throughout the 1950s, and mass mobilization for large-scale conservation efforts during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) imbued women’s labor with even greater importance. The highly-militarized conservation campaigns of the Great Leap, and the famine to which they contributed, subjected rural women to burdens that directly affected their domestic lives, damaged their reproductive health, and had enduring corporeal effects.

The conventional campaign of an extraordinary election

ABSTRACTWhile the prediction of an exceptional victory of populist forces was shared by analysts at the closing of the parliamentary term, and accordingly a harsh electoral competition was expected, albeit with the aura of uncertainty raised by the new electoral law (‘Rosatellum’), the actual campaign has not proved at all ‘exceptional’. The leaders, the issues and the media coverage were rather a follow-up of the 2013 campaign. That campaign was truly a departure from the campaigning patterns of previous Italian electoral contests, both those of the ‘majoritarian’ (‘Mattarellum’) years and of the ‘proportional’ (‘Porcellum’) ones. What has marked significantly the 2018 campaign has been instead the intensive use of the social media

From Underground Terrorism to State Terrorism and Beyond: The Question of Terrorism in the Finnish Jäger Movement during and after the First World War

ABSTRACTPolitical terrorism has played an integral part in the independence struggle of several sovereign nations, and resistance and liberation movements have often had to resort to terrorism as a deliberate strategy. In the Finnish nationalist struggle for independence, a key role was played by the Jäger Movement, which combined the features of transnational war volunteerism and an underground organization. The military cooperation with Germany against the Russian Empire during the First World War, and the creation of the Finnish 27th Royal Prussian Jäger Battalion, also necessitated the establishment of a clandestine recruitment network in Finland, which effectively operated as an underground organization. During the war, the Jäger Movement was repeatedly faced with the question of resorting to reprisals and terror tactics. This process culminated in the autumn of 1916, and briefly showed signs of escalating to the level of an actual terror campaign, until it was cut short by the Russian February Revolution. Nonetheless, the accumulated propensity for political violence manifested itself during the subsequent Finnish Civil War, as well as during the far-right reaction of the early 1930s. The article approaches the question of terrorism in the Jäger Movement during this era, the issue of deploying “enforcement terror” during the independence struggle, and the subsequent distinctive participation of Jägers in state terror during the Civil War and the extreme right-wing political terror in the 1930s.

Optimal Survey Design for Offshore Deformation Monitoring

Monitoring deformation experienced by facilities engaged in offshore hydrocarbon extraction is important to understanding any structural integrity changes a production and development asset may suffer. Facilities can be platform or seabed based depending upon water depth and environment in which the assets are situated. There have been some well document case studies showing different survey techniques being used to undertake such monitoring campaigns in a variety of different settings, and reference is made to these publications. This research takes a step back to examine the problem from a Geomatics perspective. This is achieved by firstly, developing mathematical model(s) showing all the deformation parameters a facility will experience and secondly, determining an optimal survey design that will measure the deformation parameters to required quality measure tolerance. This includes consideration of coordinate system usage and the actual survey observation campaign. The optimal observation scheme is described by the selection of where survey control stations will be located, and the observations made between the stations to measure the deformation parameters of the model. Next, consideration is given to the error budget the observations must operate within to develop the stochastic model incorporate into the survey design. The dynamic deformation model must include the rates of change a facility is expected to experience within each of the directional vectors of the model (e.g. pitch, roll, yaw and heave) and the statistical tolerance to which they are required. The results of the survey design will compute aposteriori matrices from which the classical quality measures are derived. The computational process enables multiple scenarios to be examined to help determine optimal observation schemes for individual facilities in different offshore environments. Finally, current technologies are examined to determine which are best suited to measure the rates of change built into the deformation model to the quality tolerances specified. The final observation scheme will recommend an optimal combination of technologies to best determine subsidence rates for different offshore environments.

The Myths of Data-Driven Campaigning

Campaigns’ ability to use data and analytics to make informed decisions about the strategies and tactics they deploy is unparalleled, and also understudied. While much has been written about the possibilities of data driven campaigning, the on-the-ground realities are often much less precise and much less novel than journalistic coverage implies. This piece investigates the gap between the rhetoric of data driven campaigning and actual campaign practices, especially as it relates to how the 2016 Trump campaign compares to the 2016 Clinton campaign, other prior presidential campaigns, and down-ballot races in recent years. It focuses on the use of analytics in two channels in particular, social media and email, as those offer many opportunities for targeting and message testing. Ultimately, I argue that despite the great amount of journalistic attention paid to the Trump campaign’s novel use of data and analytics, their email campaign was significantly underpowered, while their use of Facebook analytics was comparable in quality and greater in quantity than other leaders in the field.

Goal Proximity, Social Information, and Giving: When Norms Backfire

Two types of information commonly presented to potential donors by fundraisers are (a) the percentage of the fundraising campaign goal reached, and (b) the number of donors to that campaign. Research on goal gradient motivation and descriptive norms would predict higher contributions as the goal is approached and when there are many past donors to a given campaign. However, we demonstrate that when close to the campaign goal, individuals contribute more when they learn there are few (versus many) past donors. In Study 1 (N=13,232), we observe this pattern across actual campaigns on a fundraising website. In Study 2 (N=571), we obtain causal evidence for this effect in a laboratory experiment. In Study 3 (N=709), we replicate this effect, and show that it is driven by an increase in perceived impact on reaching the campaign goal. This work identifies a counterintuitive consequence of norm information, and has implications for fundraisers

Goal Proximity, Social Information, and Giving: When Norms Backfire

Two types of information commonly presented to potential donors by fundraisers are (a) the percentage of the fundraising campaign goal reached, and (b) the number of donors to that campaign. Research on goal gradient motivation and descriptive norms would predict higher donations as the goal is approached and when there are many past donors to a given campaign. However, in two studies, we demonstrate that when close to the campaign goal, individuals donate more when they learn there are few (versus many) past donors. In Study 1 (N=13,232), we observe this pattern across actual campaigns on a fundraising website. In Study 2 (N=571), we obtain causal evidence for this effect in a laboratory experiment, and show that the effect is driven by an increase in donors’ perceived impact on reaching the campaign goal. This work identifies a novel context in which norms can backfire, and has practical implications for fundraisers.

Strategic Silences in the Brexit Debate: Gender, Marginality and Governance

This article explores some of the medium term implications of the EU Referendum on the position and future of women’s rights in the UK. Using process tracing, the article explores the complex relationship between EU and UK legislation in the area of maternity rights. Specifically, it argues that considering the UK government’s opposition to the original Pregnant Worker Directive (1992) and later to the abandoned Amendment Directive, we can expect these regulations to become watered down. The economic and political environment that shaped the EU Referendum campaigns will frame the UK’s negotiations to leave the EU in favour of de-regulation. The UK’s withdrawal from European institutions increases the vulnerability of marginal groups and interests as layers of representation are taken away. Moreover, the invisibility of gender issues and the largely strategic deployment of women in the actual campaigns is likely to compound the impact of the well-established position of the UK on equality matters, as highlighted by negotiations on the pregnant worker directives.

Falling short of expectations: the 2012 children amendment, from drafting to referendum

ABSTRACTIn November 2012, the Irish electorate approved a new provision in the Constitution dedicated to children’s rights. The popular portrayal of the referendum campaign was that it was largely uncontroversial, albeit with a sting in the tail. However, this over-simplifies the reality of a political struggle that was vigorously contested for almost a decade before the actual referendum campaign. While the idea of a children’s rights amendment was never far from the political agenda during this period, the political appetite for ambitious reform ebbed and flowed. The campaign itself was successful in passing the amendment, but the outcome was nonetheless seen as a disappointing one. This paper will explore two questions regarding the genesis and evolution of the children amendment, from initial public consultations through to the referendum campaign. First, what were the political forces that sought to influence the wording of the amendment, and which side had more reason to be pleased with the final product? Second, what were the factors that caused the referendum campaign to play out in such an unsatisfactory way for the Government?