Support For Candidates Research Articles

They Saw a Debate: Political Polarization Is Associated with Greater Multivariate Neural Synchrony When Viewing the Opposing Candidate Speak.

With rampant polarization in current U.S. politics, it seems as though political partisans with opposing viewpoints are living in parallel realities. Indeed, prior research shows that people's impressions/attitudes toward political candidates are intertwined with their political affiliation. The current study investigated the relationship between political affiliation and intersubject neural synchrony of multivariate patterns of activity during naturalistic viewing of a presidential debate. Before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 20 individuals varying in political affiliation underwent functional neuroimaging while watching the first debate between candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Pairs of participants with more polarized political affiliations were higher in neural synchrony in a system of brain regions involved in self-referential processing when viewing the opposing candidate speak compared with that candidate's supporters regardless of which extreme of the political spectrum they occupied. Moreover, pairs of political partisans matching in the candidate they supported were higher in neural synchrony when watching the candidate they opposed compared with the one they both supported. These findings suggest that political groups' shared understanding may be driven more by perceptions of outgroups than of their own party/candidates.

Measuring Alignment of Online Grassroots Political Communities with Political Campaigns

Social media reduces barriers for the formation of large, self-organizing grassroots communities. For political campaigns this poses significant opportunities to address declining party membership, but also reputational risks and potential loss of campaign coherence. While balancing these factors is often done informally, we adopt a behavioural approach by using neural community embeddings to evaluate online communities along cultural, political, and demographic dimensions. We apply this technique to the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primaries and the website Reddit, providing novel insights into the important tension between campaigns and third-party actors. Using two benchmark comparison classes, we demonstrate that our embedding dimensions mirror their offline analogues, but more so the views of a candidate's supporters than the candidate's themselves. Finally, we introduce temporal aspects to our community embedding to evaluate the stability of political communities and their interrelations. These analyses serve as an exploration and application of our novel embedding methodology, and give insight into the relationship between online communities and the movements they support.

When Do Voters Punish Corrupt Politicians? Experimental Evidence from a Field and Survey Experiment

AbstractWhen do voters punish corrupt politicians? Heterogeneous views about the importance of corruption can determine whether or not increased information enhances accountability. If partisan cleavages correlate with the importance voters place on corruption, then the consequences of information may vary by candidate, even when voters identify multiple candidates as corrupt. We provide evidence of this mechanism from a field experiment in a mayoral election in Brazil where a reputable interest group declared both candidates corrupt. We distributed fliers in the runoff mayoral election in São Paulo. Informing voters about the challenger's record reduced turnout by 1.9 percentage points and increased the opponent's vote by 2.6 percentage points. Informing voters about the incumbent's record had no effect on behavior. We attribute this divergent finding to differences in how each candidate's supporters view corruption. Using survey data and a survey experiment, we show that the challenger's supporters are more willing to punish their candidate for corruption, while the incumbent's supporters lack this inclination.

Political Conflict on the Results of Recapitulation in Regional Head Elections in North Borneo Province in 2015

The conflict that occurred amid the people of North Borneo Province in the Regional Head Election for the first time in 2015 was the non-acceptance of one of the candidate's supporters after the recapitulation of the vote count. Demonstrations of facilities damage conflicts include burning the Governor's office, burning of the Regional Election Commission (KPUD) office, banners, burning tires, and burning cars. This study uses qualitative research methods with a phenomenological approach, in data collection with in-depth interviews with resource persons including Chairperson of Regional Election Commission (KPUD), Commissioner of Regional Election Commission (KPUD), Members of Regional Election Commission (KPUD), and Regency Communities Bulungan. This research is also inseparable by collecting books, journals, reputable websites, and the like related to research. Furthermore, the data is managed using the Nvivo 12 Plus software, with Crosstab Analysis feature in common sentences, then concluded. The results showed that the trigger for the reaction that resulted in the conflict was due to regional sentiment, indicating that there was an indication of money politics, the state civil apparatus (ASN), and the lack of C6 forms.

The Iceberg Theory of Campaign Contributions: Political Threats and Interest Group Behavior

We present a model where special interest groups condition contributions on the receiving candidate's support and also her opponent's. This allows interest groups to obtain support from contributions as well as from threats of contributing. Out-of-equilibrium contributions help explain the missing money puzzle. Our framework contradicts standard models in predicting that interest groups give to only one side of a race. We also predict that special interest groups will mainly target lopsided winners, whereas general interest groups will contribute mainly to candidates in close races. We verify these predictions in FEC data for US House elections from 1984–1990. (JEL D72)

Ideology, Issues, and Limited Information: Implications for Voting Behavior

Recent research on the role of news coverage in political processes has focused on how media representations affect different types of people in different ways. Following this tradition, this study presented participants with a news story about a fictional extremist group that shared the same issue with a real group they had selected as either their most or least liked. After reading the news story, participants indicated their intent to vote for a candidate based on the candidate's support or opposition to the group. The findings demonstrate no main effects for ideology but a consistent interaction between respondent ideology and least- vs. most-liked group condition. Specifically, liberals were more likely to vote based on a politician's stance toward an ideologically extreme group than were conservatives. Additional analyses indicate that tolerance or values do not moderate this relationship. These findings provide evidence that media manipulations impact support or opposition of groups.

The Iceberg Theory of Campaign Contributions: Political Threats and Interest Group Behavior

This paper presents a model of campaign contributions where a special interest group can condition its contributions not only on the receiving candidate's support but also on that of her opponent. This allows the interest group to obtain support both from contributions as well as from the implicit threat of contributing to the opponent. These out-of-equilibrium contributions can help explain the missing puzzle in the empirical literature. Our framework contradicts standard models in predicting that interest groups do not give to both sides of a same race. It also predicts that stronger candidates get more money from special interest groups primarily because more contributors give to lop-sided winners, not because more money is given per contribution. Both of these predictions are strongly supported in FEC data for U.S. House Elections from 1984-2004. Our theory also predicts that special interest groups will mainly target lop-sided winners whereas general (partisan) interest groups will contribute mainly to candidates in close races. This is also verified empirically. Finally, our framework implies that stricter campaign finance rules will always lower special interest influence but may lead to an increase in equilibrium contributions, making the latter a poor measure of effectiveness.

The Indirect Effects of Discredited Stereotypes in Judgments of Jewish Leaders

Can stereotypes of ethnic groups have an indirect impact on voters' judgments even if voters reject them? We examine the case of Jewish leaders and hypothesize that acceptable political stereotypes (Jews are liberal) are linked in voters' minds to unacceptable social stereotypes (Jews are shady); consequently, a cue to the candidate's shadiness works indirectly by increasing the perception that the candidate is liberal, even as the shady cue is rejected. Using three national survey‐experiments we randomly varied a candidate's Jewish identity, ideology, and shadiness. The cue to the rejected social stereotype indeed activates the more legitimate political stereotype. Moreover, voters give more weight to the candidate's perceived liberalism in their evaluation. Consequently, the candidate's support suffers. However, when the candidate takes a more extreme ideological position on issues, the effects disappear. The indirect influence of discredited stereotypes and the limits of those stereotypes have implications for our understanding of voting and of the legacies of discrimination.

Minor parties and strategic voting in recent U.S. presidential elections

I measure and explain strategic voting in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 U.S. presidential elections. Aggregate polling and election data from the 50 states and District of Columbia indicate whether a minor party candidate's support rose or fell between the final poll and Election Day. A negative vote-poll gap is evidence of classic strategic voting while a positive vote-poll gap is evidence of expressive strategic voting. Expressive voting was widespread in 1992 and 1996, but instrumental voting was dominant in 2000. In 2000 Ralph Nader lost support in most states, particularly those where the major party contest was competitive. In contrast, Ross Perot gained in most states due to expressive strategic voting facilitated by the noncompetitive national race. I also show that the vote-poll gap is a product of changes in voter turnout and, to a lesser extent, elite mobilization.

A general stability analysis on regional and national voting schemes against noise—why is an electoral college more stable than a direct popular election?

By discarding the previous restrictive weak average distribution assumption on region sizes, we have developed a new general probabilistic model on the regional voting (known as “direct popular voting” in political science) and the national voting (typically, the electoral college), where we regard the percentage of a candidate's supporters in the nation as the probability of a voter voting for the candidate. Our analysis demonstrates that the regional voting is always more stable than the national voting, and that the stability margin of the regional voting always increases as the size of such partitioned regions decreases down to a certain critical value of region size, beyond which the stability margin starts to decrease, asymptoting to a national voting level where the size of the partitioned regions approaches the unit of voting cell so that the improved stability of the regional voting by localizing the effects of noise into a restricted number of smaller effective areas will not be effective. Our stability analysis remains valid over the entire range in size of the partitioned regions for regional voting. We show that the regional voting asymptotes to the national voting in two extreme limiting cases, when the region size decreases to a voting cell size and when the region size increases to the size of the nation.

Is Negative Advertising Effective for Female Candidates?

Female candidates sometimes are discouraged from negative campaigning because they would risk voter backlash by defying gender stereotypes. In this experiment, a negative television campaign advertisement was manipulated to control for the candidate's gender, issue content, and the character traits emphasized in the narration. The female candidate's support was not diminished because of the attack upon her opponent. The findings show that in low-information contests, female candidates are assumed to be weaker on “male” issues. However, when the female candidate used a “male” issue as the basis of an attack upon her male opponent, she was judged more competent on the issue. This suggests that negative advertising could be an effective tool to neutralize the disadvantages caused by gender stereotypes.

A neo-Downsian model of group-oriented voting and racial backlash

We extend the standard Downsian framework to suppose that voters consider the identity of each candidate's supporters when deciding whom to support, rather than considering only the announced policy positions of the candidates. In particular we posit the existence of a class of voters whose support for a candidate reduces support by some other voters for that candidate. Our most important result concerns the conditions under which the addition to the electorate of new voters on one side of the policy spectrum shifts the equilibrium toward the opposite direction. The model can explain why enfranchisement of blacks did not immediately help the election of liberal candidates.