Candidate Issue Positions Research Articles

ARE CATHOLICS UNIQUELY CROSS-PRESSURED? POLICY BELIEFS AND VOTING BEHAVIOR BY RELIGIOUS TRADITION IN RECENT U.S. ELECTIONS

The Catholic Church’s pro-life, pro-social justice policy agenda takes the sides of both major US political parties. This potentially cross-pressures Catholic voters’ choice between those parties, but could alternatively legitimate a Catholic voter’s personal partisan preference. This paper examines whether Catholic voters who share the Church’s core policy positions are more or less likely than comparably cross-pressured non-Catholic voters to exhibit political behaviors associated with cross-pressures: avoiding identification with a major party, avoiding voting or a major-party vote choice, defecting from one’s party in voting, and selectively misperceiving candidate issue positions. Analyzing data from the 2016-2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies and the 1992-2016 American National Election Studies, I find little evidence that Catholics are uniquely, strongly cross-pressured. If anything, cross-pressured (and other) Catholics are more likely than comparable non-Catholics–even those in faith traditions that are more clearly aligned with a single party–to embrace partisan politics. In some cases, partisan differences between Catholics in their responsiveness to cross-pressures exceed differences between Catholics and non-Catholics.

Do Citizens use Sociodemographic Characteristics as Cues to Infer Candidate Issue Positions?

AbstractIn open‐list proportional representation systems, choosing candidates based on issue proximity can improve policy congruence. However, in practice, voters may not know enough about individual candidates to do so. Hence, we examine whether voters infer individual positions from cues provided on ballots, namely age and residence. Studying the Swiss parliamentary elections of 2019, we focus on environmental policy, both a very salient issue and featuring considerable intra‐party heterogeneity of positions. We combine comprehensive candidate data with a representative voter survey and conduct a survey‐embedded experiment (N = 10,758). We find that citizens have indeed little knowledge of candidate positions. However, ballot cues predict policy differences among candidates within parties only to a limited extent, and the experiment does not suggest that voters use ballot information to predict positions directly. Instead, as suggested by additional analyses, citizens may perceive candidates who resemble their own sociodemographic profile as having positions closer to their own.

Heterogeneity of Facebook friend network facilitates political learning: Evidence from a panel survey during the 2016 US presidential campaign

ABSTRACT This study examined the effects of Facebook network heterogeneity on campaign knowledge gain by looking at the process where heterogeneity facilitates exposure to information about elections. Findings suggested that Facebook network heterogeneity promoted exposure to campaign information that, in turn, predicted knowledge about candidate issue positions. This indirect effect of network heterogeneity was conditioned by the level of campaign interest. To elaborate, a more heterogeneous Facebook network was positively associated with campaign knowledge for people with lower levels of campaign interest, suggesting that Facebook has the potential to narrow the knowledge gap between the politically attentive and the politically inattentive. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Evaluations of candidates’ non-policy characteristics from issue positions: Evidence of valence spillover

Why do most winning candidates adhere to partisan orthodox positions? While some prior work has examined how issue positions signal candidate ideology, this paper instead focuses on how candidate issue positions affect evaluations of valence. In light of important inferential limitations in using the correlation between observed candidate positions and electoral performance to assess voter responses, we present a large-scale candidate vignette experiment that reveals issue positions affect perceptions of non-ideological characteristics. Candidates with only one of three positions that stray from the “typical” position for their party – being too extreme, bipartisan, or ideologically unusual – are perceived as less effective legislators. This suggests party-consistency may be reinforced by the electorate through changes in perceived valence, and that the observed correlation between candidate performance and issue positions might arise for reasons apart from ideology.

Appealing broadly while appearing unified: Resolving an electoral dilemma

AbstractPolitical parties have an electoral incentive to appear ideologically unified, but also to appeal broadly to different groups of voters with diverse preferences. This paper suggests that parties respond to both incentives through the distribution of candidate issue positions. Members of Parliament (MPs) are responsible for their party's national reputation and thus rarely take positions that diverge from those of their party. Non‐incumbent candidates, on the other hand, are mostly visible within their electoral district and thus more likely to diverge from party positions that are unpopular among their constituents. These possibilities are tested with candidate position taking data from nine voting advice applications in Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland. The results are consistent with the theoretical expectations and have important implications for the way representation works in parliamentary democracies as well as for the broader literature on the topic.

How Issue Positions Affect Candidate Performance: Experiments Comparing Campaign Donors and the Mass Public

In light of important limitations in using observed contribution behavior or surveys to assess how donors respond to candidate issue positions, we present novel experimental evidence about how habitual donors (individuals who contribute above average amounts, multiple times, and in consecutive elections) respond to candidate issue positions. Using a vignette design, we provide causal evidence about the support for two types of divergence from typical candidate issue position bundles—being too extreme or bipartisan. We show “typical” candidates outperform all others in terms of likelihood of attracting donations, primary votes, and general election votes. We also find that donors’ responsiveness to positions vis-a-vis a non-donor sample is not solely driven by partisan intensity and key demographics (i.e., high educated, high income, age, etc.). These results provide evidence that party-consistent positioning among candidates and incumbents may be reinforced by donors’ opposition to issue positions that diverge from the party-standard.

Battleground States and Local Coverage of American Presidential Campaigns

Analyses of television news and major newspapers have led to the critique that “the media” ignore the issues in campaigns, which could explain studies that show limited effects for media coverage on knowledge. These studies overlook great variation in the quantity and quality of news coverage in local information environments. Using data collected from local newspaper websites during the 2012 American presidential election, we show the quality and quantity of local news campaign coverage differ substantially between battleground and nonbattleground states. In an effort to differentiate themselves from other news outlets, newspapers in battleground states play up the local angle (e.g., candidate visits), resulting in less attention to issues in their stories. These findings suggest the voters most important to the election outcome (i.e., those in battleground states) may have less information on candidate issue positions available within their local media market.

The Southern Accent as a Heuristic in American Campaigns and Elections

Are political candidates perceived differently based on the presence or absence of a southern accent? To address this question, we employ an experimental design that explores reactions to political candidates with a southern accent and a regionally neutral accent. We focus on perceptions of three general categories of candidate characteristics: candidate traits, candidate affect, and candidate issue positions. Overall, we discover that candidates with a southern accent are viewed more negatively, and they are thought to hold more conservative policy positions, than candidates with no discernible accent. Our findings suggest that the southern accent provides a heuristic that affects how voters perceive candidates.

Memory for Positive and Negative Political TV Ads: The Role of Partisanship and Gamma Power

Despite generating widespread contempt, political TV ads play an important informational role in the lives of citizens. This study examines effects of Ad Type (Positive, Negative, and Comparison) on recognition memory for candidate issue positions. Potential moderators (Ad Sponsor Partisanship X Viewer Partisanship, Ad Type X Viewer Ideology, Ad Type X Viewer Partisanship) of political ad memory are explored, and electroencephalography (EEG) recordings are used to examine whether semantic processing (indexed as brain activity in the gamma band frequency range) mediates main or moderated effects of Ad Type on Memory. Results reveal a significant interaction between Ad Type and Partisanship, with Republicans remembering more from positive relative to negative ads (significant), and Democrats remembering more from negative ads (marginally significant). A direct effect of Gamma on Memory highlights the considerable potential that EEG (in general) and the gamma frequency band (in particular) may hold for the study of message processing.

Televised Exposure to Politics: New Measures for a Fragmented Media Environment

For many research purposes, scholars need reliable and valid survey measures of the extent to which people have been exposed to various kinds of political content in mass media. Nonetheless, good measures of media exposure, and of exposure to political television in particular, have proven elusive. Increasingly fragmented audiences for political television have only made this problem more severe. To address these concerns, we propose a new way of measuring exposure to political television and evaluate its reliability and predictive validity using three waves of nationally representative panel data collected during the 2008 presidential campaign. We find that people can reliably report the specific television programs they watch regularly, and that these measures predict change over time in knowledge of candidate issue positions, a much higher standard of predictive validity than any other measure has met to date.

The Valence Advantage of Presidential Persuasion: Do Presidential Candidates Use Oratory to Persuade Citizens to Vote Contrary to Ideological Preferences?

Can voters be persuaded to support a candidate based on a candidate's communication skills instead of a candidate's issue positions? Combining theoretical insights on voter decision-making drawn from valence theories of candidate-position taking with insights from theories of rhetoric and persuasion, we argue that candidate rhetoric can sway voters to a candidate's side. We examine the sophistication and style of candidate speech in U.S. presidential elections from 1976-2004 using Flesch-Kincaid grade-level measures and Diction measures of presidential speech. We find that more sophisticated campaign speech by a candidate results in a higher likelihood that a citizen will vote for that candidate, though this effect of linguistic sophistication is conditioned by voter cognition. The most highly educated voters are most likely to use the non-policy dimension of complex rhetoric in casting their vote. This finding runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that higher educated voters - because of their cognitive abilities - would be most likely to vote 'rationally' based primarily on issue preferences. We also find that candidates who present themselves using language that draws on themes of commonality, activity, and realism are more likely to win a citizen's vote in the election. These results suggest that rhetoric matters: it can sway voters, but it also suggests that soaring and powerful rhetoric can be offset when the voter perceives high ideological congruence with the rhetorically-disadvantaged candidate.

Confusion or Enlightenment?

Recent research has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between interpersonal discussion and media use in the production of political knowledge. This study seeks to better illuminate this relationship by introducing political disagreement as an additional moderator. Using nationally representative survey data collected during the 2000 primary campaign, the authors find a negative interaction between discussion frequency and disagreement in predicting knowledge of candidate issue positions. This suggests either that the benefits of frequent discussion are stronger for those whose discussion networks are composed of like-minded others or that disagreement facilitates learning only at low levels of discussion frequency. Results also demonstrate that frequent discussion enhances the relationship between debate viewing and issue knowledge among those who reside in politically homogenous networks. In diverse networks, however, the relationship between debate viewing and issue knowledge is weaker for those who regularly talk about politics than those who talk less. Political disagreement is unassociated with knowledge of candidates' personal backgrounds.

Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts – By Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda – By Paul Manna

Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts – By Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda – By Paul Manna

A Prejudice for the Thinking Classes

Research on attitudes toward Christian fundamentalists shows that antagonism toward this group has become a significant factor since the early 1990s in structuring candidate preferences and issue positions. This article explores how information conveyed in news media helped inform popular evaluations of fundamentalists and instruct antifundamentalists on how to make use of these judgments politically in the culture wars. Our thesis is that attitudes toward Christian fundamentalists can be considered in large measure as a reaction to messages about this group carried in media, filtered through individual differences in political attentiveness and predispositions. Data from the 1988—2004 American National Election Studies show significant media effects, which increased over time, particularly among the sophisticated segment of the public. Our findings illuminate how variation in media attentiveness and individual differences in political and cultural predispositions conjoin to determine whether and the degree to which nonfundamentalists feel antagonistically toward Christian fundamentalists.

Voter Learning in the 2004 Presidential Election: Did the Media Matter?

This study examines the relationships of exposure and attention to various news media, including the Internet, with information learned about the issue positions of candidates George Bush and John Kerry, interest in the 2004 election campaign, and intention to vote among a random sample of adult residents of Indiana who were interviewed by telephone in October 2004. The results are compared with our previous studies of the 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000 U.S. presidential elections. In general, our studies suggest that attention to television news, televised debates, and now Internet news are important predictors, or at least correlates, of voter learning of candidate issue positions and voter interest in the election campaigns. These findings contradict the hypothesis that increased news media use leads to increased voter apathy and alienation from the political process.

Who Watches Presidential Debates? A Comparative Analysis of Presidential Debate Viewing in 2000 and 2004

Presidential debates are a main feature of present-day presidential campaigns. For voters, they are a source of political learning about candidate issue positions. Fluctuations in the level of debate viewership from election to election and, within an election, from debate to debate invite the following questions: What is the composition of debate audiences? In what ways did the audiences in 2004 differ from 2000? In what ways did the audiences change across debates in a given year? Results from the 2000 and 2004 National Annenberg Election Surveys show that debate audiences in 2004 were larger than in 2000. In both elections, the first debate garnered the most viewers. The data also show that those individuals inclined to watch a debate in its entirety tended to be older, be more educated, have higher incomes, and exhibit higher levels of partisan attachment than those who did not watch the debates.

A Natural Experiment of Race-Based and Issue Voting: The 2001 City of Los Angeles Elections

The theory of racially polarized voting suggests that race is a primary determinant of vote choice in elections where a minority candidate is pitted against a white candidate. The spatial model of voting suggests that voters consider the issue positions of candidates and choose the candidate closest to their own positions. The unique context of the 2001 Los Angeles city election allows us to test these two theories. In each of two races in this election, a Latino candidate competed against a white candidate. In one race the white candidate was considered more liberal, while in the other race the Latino candidate was seen as more liberal. This particular ethnic and ideological composition provides us with a natural experimenting which to test the two competing theories. While voter ethnicity mattered, we show that consistent with the spatial model, voters also relied on issues and ideology as factors in their voting choices. By considering the choices voters are making in two different elections, we argue that estimates of the extent of racial voting in previous research may be overstated.

Heterogeneity and Certainty in Candidate Evaluations

While perceptions of candidate character traits are believed to be an important predictor of vote choice, very little research attempts to explain where these perceptions come from. There is also a remarkable inconsistency in the literature about which voters use traits and which use issues in voting-with completely contradictory results common. The solution to the inconsistency developed here is to focus on the relationship between issues and traits as opposed to just these attitudes' direct effect on candidate evaluations. By positing that the relationship between issues and trait perceptions depends on the citizen's certainty about the candidate's issue positions the theory develop here answers questions about the nature of trait perceptions and the heterogeneity of voter decisionmaking. The theory is tested using evaluations of ten different presidential candidates from five National Election Studies.

Who Cares About the Issues? Issue Voting and the Role of News Media During the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Analyzing data from the 2000 American National Election Study, we examined the role of news media in facilitating issue voting. We found that respondents who paid greater attention to news coverage of the election were more likely to hold specific opinions on campaign issues. Voters who devoted greater attention to news media were also more aware of where each candidate stood on various policy issues. These two political cognitions (issue opinionation and knowledge of candidate issue positions) were important conditions for issue voting. We found that those who devoted greater attention to news media were more concerned about the issues when making electoral choices. Beyond and above demographic predispositions, we conclude that issue voting is also a function of paying attention to news media.

Testing Spatial Models of Elections: The Influence of Voters and Elites on Candidate Issue Positions

This research tests spatial models of electoral competition using survey data on state legislative candidates' policy positions and ideology in eight U.S. states. Our data support several hypotheses: 1) candidates' issue positions do not converge; 2) party elites have more extreme positions than do candidates; 3) candidate issue positioning is a function of party‐elite issue positions and union involvement in the campaign, as well as constituency characteristics; and 4) when candidates rely heavily on elite resources during their campaign, elites become more important in shaping candidate issue positions.