American Political Campaigns Research Articles

Timing and responsiveness in American political advertising campaigns

AbstractObjectiveThough candidates for political office use their campaigns to appeal to voters, they are unable to do so uninterrupted. Prior research suggests that they must respond to the advertising strategies employed by their opponents when determining their own strategies. How does this responsiveness vary across the campaign cycle?MethodsI test how general election television advertising responsiveness varies over the course of the campaign cycle using data from 256 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial contests.ResultsThe results of my analyses show that candidates' overall, negative, and (to an extent) issue‐based advertising strategies become less informed by their opponents' strategies as Election Day approaches.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that candidates use the early stages of their campaigns to find effective general advertising strategies and become less responsive to their opponents once they have done so. In other words, campaigns appear to stay on message to a greater extent as the campaign unfolds.

Dark Parties: Unveiling Nonparty Communities in American Political Campaigns

Since 2010, independent expenditures have grown as a source of spending in American elections. A large and growing portion comes from “dark money” groups—political nonprofits whose terms of incorporation allow them to partially obscure their sources of income. I develop a new dataset of about 2,350,000 tax documents released by the IRS and use it to test a new theory of political spending. I posit that pathways for anonymous giving allowed interest groups to form new networks and create new pathways for money into candidate races apart from established political parties. Akin to networked party organizations discovered by other scholars, these dark money networks channel money from central hubs to peripheral electioneering groups. I further show that accounting for these dark money networks makes previously peripheral nodes more important to the larger network and diminishes the primacy of party affiliated organizations in funneling money into candidate races.

Viewed from Different Engels? Differences in Reactions to “Socialism” as a Policy Label

The supposed popularity of socialism among young Americans has been a trending topic in American political media and campaigns. While evidence from public opinion polls disagrees as to whether socialism is truly gaining in popularity, the use of the term “socialism” has had a profound impact on policy discussions in the media and has featured as a prominent Republican Party strategy in the 2020 election cycle. This gives rise to important questions: How do individuals react to the socialist label? Does the socialist label serve as an ideological or affective signal? Are attacks that frame policies as socialist effective in decreasing policy support? Using original observational and experimental survey data, we find that individuals have strong polarized affective reactions to the socialist label. However, framing popular social welfare policies as socialist is ineffective in undermining popular support. Implications suggest that while framing political policies as socialist may trigger affective polarization, it is likely an ineffective means of political persuasion. As a result, oversaturation of the term in the media may lead to misleading conclusions about both political ideology and individual political behavior.

Political Campaigns, Voter Outreach, and American Democracy: Socializing Effective Participation and Citizen Agency in the United States

ABSTRACTDrawing from linguistic and ethnographic data collected from Women for Obama, South Hills (WFOSH) volunteers and Obama for America (OFA) campaign operatives in western Pennsylvania during the 2012 general election cycle, this study examines metacommentary about the ideal form and function of citizen‐to‐citizen political interaction in the United States, focusing on the persuasive impact of language objects, mediation, and the construction of relatability in voter outreach, as well as subsequent assessments of outreach effectiveness. Voter outreach, considered as direct communication between local campaign volunteers and voters, was strategically advanced by both OFA and WFOSH for meeting campaign goals. However, clashes between volunteers and operatives reveal competing understandings of effective political participation within outreach interactions. This analysis suggests that operatives within contemporary data‐driven American political campaigns more and less overtly socialize citizens’ understandings of democracy in ways that can exacerbate polarization and devalue citizens’ knowledge and agency in political practice. [democracy, discursive political participation, political agency, language materiality and mediation, political campaigns, United States]

Review: Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

Review: <i>Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics</i>, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

Campaigns in control: Analyzing controlled interactivity and message discipline on Facebook

ABSTRACTMost American political campaigns use social media as one component of a broader communication strategy. Campaign use of social media is typically governed by controlled interactivity, a philosophy that attempts to leverage citizens’ online behavior toward the goal of electing the candidate. One key outcome of controlled interactivity is high levels of message discipline, the degree of correspondence between a campaign’s and its audience’s political speech. This study quantifies message discipline as it flows through two highly visible controlled-interactive spaces—Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s respective official campaign Facebook pages—during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign. The results of a lexicon analysis indicate that Romney’s campaign controlled its audience’s interactivity more effectively than the Obama campaign and that both audiences departed from message discipline most sharply on the issues of civil rights and religion.

Beyond Measuring the Voice of the People: The Evolving Role of Political Polling in Indonesia's Local Leader Elections

IntroductionFollowing the fall of Suharto in 1998, Indonesia embarked on intensive project of local democratization. Under the banner of applying Law Number 32 of 2004 regarding Regional Government, local leaders-such as governors, district leaders (bupati), and mayors-were to be directly elected by the people for the first time in Indonesian political history. In particular, from June 2005 onward, Indonesia began experiencing two enormous waves of direct local leader elections (Pemilu Kepala Daerah, Pemilukada or Pilkada; hereafter Pilkada). The first episode was from mid-2005 to the beginning of 2009, and the second is still ongoing, beginning in late 2009 and extending to the beginning of 2014. From 2005 to 2008, Indonesia held no fewer than 500 Pilkada spanning all regions (Centre for Electoral Reform 2008). According to the Badan Pengawas Pemilu or Bawaslu (Election Monitoring Body), there were also approximately 244 Pilkada during the year 2010 (Indonesia, Badan Pengawas Pemilu [Bawaslu] 2011) and 116 Pilkada in 2011. In addition, from 2005 to 2010 more than 2,200 pairs of candidates ran for gubernatorial, bupati, and mayoral offices; there were also 333 pairs running for such offices in 2011 alone (ibid.). The implementation of Pilkada has resulted in the development of a remarkably vigorous local democracy, as indicated by the massive number of candidates and the frequency of elections. Judging from the large number of elections and candidates involved, Indonesia is unquestionably the country of elections.One of the most important phenomena marking Pilkada has been the involvement of polling and other pollsters' activities in these contests. The discussion of electoral politics in Indonesia has suddenly been filled with insider accounts of the results of polling activities,1) as polling has not only become a ubiquitous new fashion in local politics but has also noticeably colored the dynamics of local leader elections. It seems likely that political polling has become integral part of almost every local leader election in Indonesia.Previous seminal works addressing the topic of political polling in Indonesia have placed more emphasis on the mushrooming of polling at the national level (Mietzner 2009), the increasing role of pollsters as professionals (Mohammad Qodari 2010) or socalled polls-based political consultants,2) and the growing employment of political marketing that is the result of the presence of pollsters in the political arena (Ufen 2010). Those studies emphasize the impact of the presence of pollsters in the two national elections in 2004 and 2009. Although the involvement of polling and pollsters at the politically vibrant national level is headline-grabbing, previous works neglect the utilization of polling by political parties in attempting to identify electable candidates, as well as the fact that polling is used as a political weapon rather than a barometer of public sentiment.Admittedly, the utilization and exploitation of polling in political history is not the newest phenomenon. In his classic seminal work more than 50 years ago, Louis Harris (1963), one of the key founders of polling, assertively foresaw that polls were an important part of the arsenal of weapons used in modern American political campaigns. R. A. Camp (1996) enthusiastically describes polling as a device that political leaders take advantage of for their own political interest, specifically to indicate successful platforms and increase their ability to defeat their opponents as well as to improve their political image. In a similar vein, Dennis Johnson (2001; 2009) and Christopher Wlezien and Robert Erikson (2003) view polling as being exploited by politicians to enhance their image during the campaign period. In short, it is not uncommon to take advantage of polling in political games.However, in the context of Indonesia, one of the largest democratic countries in the world, a study discussing the development of public opinion polling and how it has been used (and exploited) seems exceptionally limited. …

Controlling the message: new media in American political campaigns

Controlling the message: new media in American political campaigns

On the linguistic features of American political discourse

The present-day public communication space is dominated by the language of politics, thus allowing political discourse to both influence and become one of the components of contemporary culture. The paper aims at discussing the typical linguistic features of a sample of political speeches given by the major actors in American political campaigns in the year 2012. Attention will be given to the use of rhetorical devices, which serve as examples of both the figurative use of words and their constituent part of political language – used here as an instrument to increase power and to suggestively, and most frequently, subjectively, convey knowledge about the world. Though the typical linguistic features of political speeches have thus far been the focus of many linguists and researchers during their analysis of this phenomenon of discourse, not much attention has been given to establish a comparison of the rhetorical devices used by American politicians to win the hearts of a specific political party voter, i.e. a Democrat or a Republican.

Hanging Around Us in Plain Sight: The Great American Political Campaign Poster, 1844–2012

Hanging Around Us in Plain Sight: The Great American Political Campaign Poster, 1844–2012

Branding politics: Emotion, authenticity, and the marketing culture of American political communication

This article examines and critiques the logic and practices of branding that inform contemporary American political campaigns within the context of ethical surplus, sign value versus use value, emotion and reason, and the tension of authenticity and cynicism. The original research is based upon 38 one-on-one, in-depth interviews with political consultants, including media strategists, communication directors, and advertising producers who are involved in the encoding and cultural production of political discourse. The qualitative findings illuminate a professional ideology among these elite practitioners that obfuscates the pursuit of power by strategizing texts that involve emotional evocation rather than rational deliberation and embed candidates within signifiers of and proxies for authenticity. These efforts are intended to strike a disinterested, non-instrumental pose on behalf of the “branded candidates” they represent.

From Race to Ethnicity: Interpreting Japanese American Experiences in Hawai‘i by Jonathan Y. Okamura (review)

Reviewed by: From Race to Ethnicity: Interpreting Japanese American Experiences in Hawai‘i by Jonathan Y. Okamura Michael Jin From Race to Ethnicity: Interpreting Japanese American Experiences in Hawai‘i. By Jonathan Y. Okamura. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Press, 2014. xii + 255 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $42.00 cloth This insightful book makes an important contribution to the study of Japanese American experiences in Hawai‘i. From Race to Ethnicity asserts that “race was the dominating organizing principle that structured social relations in Hawai‘i” during the first century of Japanese American history in Hawai‘i until “ethnicity” replaced race as the factor that shaped the relations of power in Hawaiian society by the 1970s, when Japanese Americans emerged to rival the haoles (whites) as one of the most dominant groups (p. 2). Organized into two parts, the overall structure of the book hinges upon this transition “from historical race to contemporary ethnicity” (p. 1). Part I uses the analytical framework of race to chart the historical experiences of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i from the 1880s to the early 1970s as one of the marginalized racial groups. From the early years of Japanese American history on the islands, the haoles manifested their dominance through various legal, political, economic, and cultural oppressions to crush Japanese American resistance to institutional racism and the anti-Japanese movement. In a poignant and gripping reconstruction of the Myles Yutaka Fukunaga case, Okamura takes readers back to 1928 when the twenty-year-old Fukunaga was tried and executed for kidnapping and murdering Gill Jamieson, a young boy from a prominent haole family. The prevailing anti-Japanese sentiment in Hawai‘i helped mobilize the citizens of Honolulu to arrest and punish Fukunaga for killing a white boy. Through Okamura’s exhaustive research of legal papers and other primary documents, we learn that the hasty murder trial and execution [End Page 206] that denied Fukunaga due process served as a microcosm of the “dual system of justice” in the white man’s world that rendered Japanese Americans defenseless (p. 78). However, the book also demonstrates that from the days of the early plantation society, Japanese American men and women resisted racial oppression through labor organizing and movements to revitalize their cultural identity. In this way, Okamura’s work demonstrates the complex interplay between race, class, and gender in shaping the emergent Japanese American ethnic identity. These collective experiences of struggle and resistance laid the foundation for the Japanese American community’s transition from a racialized minority to a powerful ethnic group during the quarter century after World War II. The driving force behind the Japanese American community’s political and economic prominence by 1970 was the activism of Japanese American labor organizers and the rising Japanese American political actors in the Democratic Party on behalf of other marginalized groups in Hawai‘i during the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s, Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i wielded the powerful economic and political influence that challenged haole supremacy, making race no longer the dominant organizing principle in Hawaiian society. Part II examines how ethnicity has enabled Japanese Americans in contemporary Hawai‘i to retain their political representation and economic privilege. Once Japanese Americans achieved the status as one of the most dominant groups in Hawai‘i, ethnicity continued to serve their access to political and economic power, culminating in the election of the three-term governor George Ariyoshi from 1974 to 1986. Meanwhile, the same access to economic, education, and political resources has remained difficult to achieve for other ethnic groups, such as Filipino Americans and Native Hawaiians, who “continued to occupy a subjugated status in Hawai‘i” (p. 109). In this context, the anti-Japanese movement in the haole-dominated past has been transformed into the “anti-Japanese backlash” from these marginalized groups, who had been allies of Japanese American labor movement and political campaigns (p. 105). The author suggests that the firmly entrenched socioeconomic power of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i since the 1980s has made the participation and representation in electoral politics no longer a primary mode of retaining political power. To Okamura, this also represents a moment when less Japanese American...

Connecting the Candidates: Consultant Networks and the Diffusion of Campaign Strategy in American Congressional Elections

Modern American political campaigns are typically conceptualized as �candidate-centered� and treated as conditionally independent in quantitative analyses. In reality, however, these campaigns are linked by professional consulting firms, which are important agents of campaign strategy diffusion within the extended party networks of the contemporary era. To test our hypothesis that consultants disseminate campaign strategies among their clients, we analyze new data on U.S. House elections derived from Federal Election Commission records. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find that candidates who share consultants are more likely to use similar campaign strategies than we would otherwise expect, conditional on numerous explanatory variables. These results, which largely withstand an extensive series of robustness and falsification tests, suggest that consultants play a key role in diffusing strategies among congressional campaigns.

Political election debates: informing voters about policy and character

Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Theory and Method: Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse Chapter 3: American Presidential Campaign Debates Chapter 4: American Non-Presidential and World Political Campaign Debates Chapter 5: Incumbency in Political Campaign Debates Chapter 6: Campaign Phase in Political Campaign Debates Chapter 7: News Coverage of Political Campaign Debates Chapter 8: Issue Ownership, Functional Federalism, and Retrospective versus Prospective Voting in American Political Campaign Debates Chapter 9: Conclusion Appendix I. List of U.S. Presidential Primary, General, and Vice Presidential Campaign Debates Appendix II. Viewers for American Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates Appendix III. Forms of Policy and Character in Debates

Don't Stop Thinking about the Music: The Politics of Songs and Musicians in Presidential Campaigns. By Benjamin S.Schoening and Eric T.Kasper. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 289 pp.

Stop Thinking about the Music: The Politics of Songs and Musicians in Presidential Campaigns. By Benjamin S. Schoening and Eric T. Kasper. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 289 pp. In Stop Thinking about the Music, Benjamin S. Schoening and Eric T. Kasper provide an interdisciplinary account of the role of music in American political campaigns. Their book makes a valuable contribution to research by integrating scholarship of music history with that of presidential campaigns. The book is organized into three parts. Part One focuses on what the authors call the traditional era (1789-1916). Here, they show that music has been used as a negative campaign strategy for centuries. They also point to the 1840 election as a significant turning point in its use of (p. 44) to paint candidates as down-to-earth and, simultaneously, to demean opponents (e.g., Tippecanoe and Tyler Too set to the tune of Little Pigs). Moreover, technological advances made it possible to mass produce songbooks more efficiently, thereby making these singing campaigns accessible to voters. This use of what the authors call parody, or applying new words to a familiar tune (p. 76), would be replaced in the twentieth century with songs written expressly for the campaigns. Part Two (the mass media era) extends from about 1920 to 1984. During this period, women won the right to vote and campaign music began to reflect their issues and experiences. Moreover, radio technology brought campaign music into homes across the country. Consequently, people stopped relying as heavily on songbooks and, instead, focused on slogan songs such as Cool and Keep Coolidge. In addition, as part of the Works Progress Administration program that began in the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Federal Music Project. Through it, folk singers such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger found work by composing and singing prounion songs with progressive social messages. By the 1950s, television and campaign music sound bites began to play a central role in campaigns as well. Part Three focuses primarily on post-1984 campaign music, which is now a staple in campaigns (whether or not the musicians actually endorse the candidate). Notable early examples include Ronald Reagan's use of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A and Bill Clinton's use of Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow). By 2000, pop songs were being used unabashedly as campaign songs. Today, the Internet (much like radio and television before it) allows more people to be involved in the creation and distribution of campaign music, which is, again, marking a shift in how music is used in political campaigns. The authors close by predicting that the Internet will open even wider the doors for average citizens to introduce unsolicited campaign songs that are, also, uncontrolled by the candidates. …

The Internet and American Political Campaigns

This article provides an overview of major research findings regarding the Internet and American Political Campaigns. This is still a nascent subfield, but the research community has come to general agreement on five key points: (1) at the mass behavioral level, the Internet has not changed fundamental participatory inequalities, (2) we have seen an increase in small donor activity, and these donations tend to flow toward polarizing candidates, (3) for political campaign operations, “mundane mobilization tools” carry the largest impacts, (4) with political campaigns, the new focus on data analytics and the “culture of testing” is substantially changing resource expenditures and work routines, and (5) there is currently a clear partisan divide between how Democrats and Republicans employ digital technology for campaigning. The article also discusses the methodological challenges that separate Internet-related research from many of the more established fields of campaign finance-related research. It concludes by posing a set of research questions for the 2014 and 2016 election cycles which will likely prove fruitful.

An Alternative Politics: Texas Baptists and the Rise of the Christian Right, 1975-1985

Foy Dan Valentine. A native of East Texas, Valentine was among the most influential figures in shaping an independent political agenda for Texas Baptists throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a time when most Southern Baptists were becoming strongly identified with right-wing politics. Image courtesy of www.ChristianEthicsToday.com, which Valentine helped found in 1995. An Alternative Politics: Texas Baptists and the Rise ofthe Christian Right, 1975—1985 Blake A. Ellis* ON THE EVE OF THE 2OO4 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, NEWS COVERAGE focused on the importance of evangelical Christians to the electoral chances of the Republican candidate, George W. Bush. One Southern Baptist pastor summed up the feelings of many conservative Christians about the election: "I see it as a spiritual divide between true believers and seculars. I think we as a nation are more divided than we were before the Civil War . . . Those who pray a lot tend to vote Republican; those who don't tend to vote Democrat."1 One of the most basic facts in recent American political campaigns has been the strong Southern Baptist support for Republican candidates. The nation's largest Protestant denomination was heavily Democratic throughout much of the twentieth century, but a shift toward the GOP began in the late 1970s and grew stronger during the next two decades. During the 1980 presidential election, Southern Baptist pastors favored Republican Ronald Reagan over Democrat Jimmy Carter by a margin of 56 to 42 percent, which closely mirrored the national vote. In 1996, Southern Baptist ministers preferred Republican Bob Dole over Democrat Bill Clinton by a margin of 80 percent to 14 percent in an election easily * Blake A. Ellis is a native Arkansan who has also lived in Louisiana and Texas. He earned a Bachelor ofArts degree from Louisiana College and a Master ofArts degree in history from Baylor University. He is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in U.S. history at Rice University. He would like to thank John Boles and Kimberly Kellison for reading the article several times and offering helpful criticism. The fine archivists at the Texas Collection ofBaylor University were also instrumental in the research for diis article. Finally, this work would not have been possible widiout financial assistance from the Baylor Institute for Oral History, and the staff diere deserves immense credit for supporting diis project in a variety ofways. 1 David D. Kirkpatrick, "Batde Cry of Faithful Pits Believers Against Unbelievers," The New York Times, Oct. 31, 2004. For odier examples of such coverage, see Robert D. McFadden, "On die Final Sunday, Sermons Pulse widi die Power of Spiritual Suggestion," The New York Times, Nov. ? , 2004; Anne Saker, "Moral Values Propelled Bush; Views on Abortion, Marriage Echoed widi White Evangelicals," The News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C), Nov. 7, 2004; "Focus on Moral Values Tipped Vote for Bush," The Washington Times, Nov. 4, 2004. Vol. CXII, no. 4 Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril 2009 362Southwestern Historical QuarterlyApril won by Clinton.2 The alliance between the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and the Republican Party is such an integral aspect of contemporary politics that observers might be forgiven for not knowing that it is a relatively recent political development. The increasing affinity of Southern Baptists for the Republican Party since 1 980 is part of a larger historical trend: the rise of the Christian Right as a force in American politics.3A recent proliferation of scholarly work on the origins of the movement has deepened our understanding of it. Most of these works have examined its religious and political impulses, attempting to explain how the movement came into existence and what its goals are for the United States. These works have demonstrated that the political involvement of religious conservadves was the result of deeply held religious beliefs about controversial social issues. Without question, the most important of these issues was abortion, which they stridently opposed. Opposition to gay rights, support for organized prayer in public schools, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and concern about sex education also defined their agenda .4 Southern Baptists have been a crucial component of the Christian Right from its earliest days. Several books have addressed the importance of Southern Baptists to the growing power of...

Campaigning as an Industry: Consulting Business Models and Intra-Party Competition

American political campaigns have become a multi-billion dollar industry. Rather than assume that only political factors affect the campaigns that voters see, scholars must assess the importance of the business incentives associated with political consulting. Economic competition does not match political competition; firms compete for clients within the two major parties, against their political allies. I argue that the supply of firms in each party, the revenue models in the industry, the diversification of client types, and the cooperative structure in each party all may affect political campaigns. The way the industry operates and the different patterns of behavior within each party create incentives and practices that may alter campaigns in response to economic factors having little to do with optimal political strategy. Using two original surveys and a network analysis, I analyze how the industry is changing and how consultants in each party cooperate and compete.

Encyclopedia of U.S. campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior

of Campaigns, Elections and Electoral Analysis is a collection of approximately 450 articles in a two-volume set, presented in an A to Z alphabetical format, exploring all topics related to American political campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior, including some cross-cultural comparisons to help place campaigns, elections and electoral behavior in American in an international context.Coverage includes the history of campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior patterns at the national, state, and local levels, dating back to the pre-constitutional period. The scope of the encyclopedia is broad, focusing on all aspects of campaigns from early times to the present, tracing the various developments in campaign strategies, management styles, technologies, political advertising, campaign financing, media coverage, convention politics, and other developments in campaign politics. This Encyclopedia of Campaigns, Elections and Electoral Analysis serves as a superb reference for students, academics, politicians, public officials, political journalists, and others interested in the history and developments in campaigns, elections, and electoral behavior in America.

Radio Advertising in American Political Campaigns

Although much research has been done on advertising in American political campaigns, virtually all has focused on the use of television. The dearth of work on radio advertising limits our ability to fully understand American electoral dynamics. More campaigns use radio than television, and there is reason to suspect that the narrowcasting that is possible with highly targeted radio ads may be substantively different from the campaign messages that are broadcast over the television airwaves. In this article, we use data from a survey of registered voters in Arkansas and Missouri during the 2002 election season to explore the dynamics of political advertising on the radio. We focus in particular on factors that influence exposure to radio ads, the public’s perceptions of the importance of these ads, and the impacts of exposure on the public’s perceptions of the quality of the democratic process in the United States.