National Annenberg Election Study Research Articles

Communication Behaviors During Presidential Elections

AbstractIn this study, we use an information utility framework to examine people’s communication behaviors during presidential elections. Data from the National Annenberg Election Study (2004, 2008) and Google Trends (2012, 2016) reveal increases in several communication behaviors (e.g., attention to campaign information, discussing politics, internet searches) closer to Election Day. Moreover, these increases were not uniform throughout the election, with increases concentrated around official campaign events (e.g., presidential conventions and debates). In addition, some evidence showed that people are more likely to engage in communication behaviors in battleground compared to nonbattleground states.

Racial Minorities’ Trust in Government and Government Decisionmakers

ObjectiveCompare the impact of being a racial minority for influencing political trust as measured by the standard, NES‐developed measures with its impact on assessments of the capacity of decisionmakers to make racially unbiased spending and hiring decisions. Additionally, to examine the political trust of American Indians, an understudied racial minority.MethodsBivariate and multivariate analysis of 2004 and 2008 National Annenberg Election Study survey data.ResultsSelf‐designation as a racial minority exercises small, inconsistent effects on the standard measures of political trust and external efficacy. When citizens are asked whether Caucasian government officials make decisions on spending and hiring to advantage whites to the disadvantage of blacks and Hispanics, racial minorities state that they expect racial bias. American Indians reveal levels of political trust similar to those held by other racial minorities.ConclusionAn increasingly multiracial society will experience considerable tensions as minorities distrust government decisionmakers of a different race. These tensions will continue to be exploited by ambitious political elites.

American Partisan Media Consumption and Voting Persuasion Attempts: How 24-Hour Cable News Incites Political Proselytizing

Since the emergence of partisan cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) in the mid-1990s, the way many Americans get their political information has changed. Previous research has examined the associations between cable news viewership and individuals’ political knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, but no identifiable work has characterized second-order associations to political news consumption. To investigate the potential extent of the influence of these networks on those who don’t consume them first-hand, this study uses 2008 National Annenberg Election Study data to identify media consumption practices of people who make a political voting persuasion attempt. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that cable news viewers proselytize more frequently than other news viewers. Fixed-effects models of longitudinal data suggest that those who start watching cable news also become more likely to attempt to persuade another’s vote choice. I argue that cable news’ usage of outrage rhetoric is the catalyst to action and, to support this contention, demonstrate that viewers of the three most outrageous news programs are more likely than all other comparison groups to proselytize.

Descriptive Representation and Political Efficacy: Evidence from Obama and Clinton

Existing theory suggests that individuals who share their identity with elected officials should have more positive attitudes toward government. However, the effect has not been well identified among African Americans, and the hypothesis is underexplored with respect to women. Thus, I examine the effects of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s successes on African American and female political efficacy, using Iowa Electronic Markets contract prices during the 2008 primary to proxy daily shifts in perceptions of Obama and Clinton’s likelihood of winning. I combine this with daily political efficacy measures from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study. African American efficacy increases with Obama’s perceived probability of success, while white Democrats who prefer Obama are unaffected, suggesting that the effect among African Americans is driven by race (and not the success of a preferred candidate). Clinton’s price is not correlated with women’s efficacy, suggesting that descriptive representation’s ef...

Does Descriptive Representation Improve Political Efficacy? Evidence from Obama and Clinton

Does descriptive representation improve political efficacy? Existing theory suggests that it does: individuals who share their identity with elected officials should have more positive attitudes toward government. However, the effect that has been demonstrated for African Americans is not causally identified, and the hypothesis is under-explored with respect to women. Thus, I examine the effects of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s successes on African-American and female political efficacy, using Iowa Electronic Markets contract prices during the 2008 primary to proxy daily shifts in perceptions of Obama and Clinton’s likelihood of winning. I combine this with daily political efficacy measures from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study. African-American efficacy increases with Obama’s perceived probability of success, while white attitudes are unaffected, casting doubt that descriptive representation’s effect is zero-sum in diverse settings. Clinton’s price is not correlated with women’s efficacy, suggesting that descriptive representation’s effects are less pronounced among women.

How Partisan Media Polarize America MatthewLevendusky. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.

How Partisan Media Polarize America Matthew Levendusky. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.Partisan news media are not new in the United States. For much of this nation's history, all news reporting was partisan. Early newspapers took a clear position on issues, siding with Federalists or Anti-Federalists, Whigs or Democrats, and eventually Republicans or Democrats. While the twentieth century saw a shift to objective journalism, partisan media have reemerged in recent years. In How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky argues that the combination of partisan political news and the modern twenty-four hour news cycle has fundamentally changed the relationship between media, governance, and society.This central thesis leads to several questions. Do partisan media make individuals more polarized? Do partisan media make citizens less likely to trust or cooperate with the other political party? Do partisan media affect voting choices and the way people interpret elections? How do partisan media affect American politics in general? These questions frame Levendusky's research and provide the organizational structure for this book.Levendusky begins by demonstrating the relevance of partisan news media in contemporary society. While the audience of individual cable television programs still remains limited-and leading partisan cable news programs still attract less than half the viewership of the nightly network news broadcasts- ratings trends show that preferences are changing. News consumers are shifting away from traditional news and toward partisan cable news programs that offer heavy doses of analysis and perspective. Such changing preferences, combined with new economic, technological, and regulatory environments, have led to the rise of partisan cable news personalities, like Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow, radio talk show hosts, like Rush Limbaugh and Randi Rhodes, and websites like Town Hall and Daily Kos. While polarized news programs exist across many media today, Levendusky places a special emphasis on cable news networks, and focuses on Fox News, which caters to a Republican and conservative audience, and MSNBC, which caters to a Democratic and liberal audience.After establishing the premise for this research in the first chapter, the book goes on to present data gathered in response to the four research questions. Chapter 2 presents the results of a series of case studies and a comparative analysis of news content during the 2008 presidential election and during the first year of the Obama administration. Chapter 3 explains the implications of partisan news coverage; Chapter 4 presents results from a series of five original experiments; Chapter 5 presents results from an additional three original experiments; Chapter 6 presents results from a new analysis of data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study; and Chapter 7 synthesizes and discusses the findings. …

Knowledge Matters: Policy Cross-pressures and Black Partisanship

Black Americans are a core Democratic constituency, despite holding views on social issues that put them in conflict with the party. Conventional wisdom attributes this partisan commitment to the salience of race and concerns about racial inequality. This paper considers whether the Democratic bias derives in part from low levels of political knowledge. Using data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study, this paper examines how political knowledge moderates the relationship between social issue cross-pressures and partisan attitudes among Black Americans. I demonstrate that the extent to which Democratic allegiance persists despite policy disagreements depends on whether blacks are sufficiently knowledgeable to act on their policy views, and not simply on the importance that blacks assign to their racial commitments. It is only among politically knowledgeable Black Americans that social issue cross-pressures are at all politically consequential; for them, Democratic partisanship is resilient but not immune to policy disagreements. For blacks with low levels of political knowledge, partisan support is unaffected by policy disagreements. This pattern is most pronounced among religiously active Black Evangelicals, for whom social issues are highly salient.

Clicking to Learn During the 2008 Presidential Election: Why Capturing Channel Switching Matters

This article examines the effect that channel switching among news programs has on knowledge of the issue stands of the 2008 presidential candidates. Past studies focused on news-to-non-news-switching found news grazing to be negatively related to levels of political knowledge. Drawing on data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES) the study concludes that: 1) during the 2008 general election many viewers switched from one news program to another; 2) switchers were disproportionately those who reported closely following the election; 3) the level of channel switching was dynamic during the 2008 campaign and peaked during the parties' convention; 4) switching from one news program to another was positively related to knowledge of the candidates' issue stances, in the presence of controls, and 5) the impact of channel switching on knowledge is moderated by how closely one follows the election. The implication of the results and possible directions for future research are discussed.

Creating Constituencies: Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of Conflict, and Selective Mobilization

We investigate how material and symbolic campaign appeals may motivate segments of the electorate to be more engaged with the unfolding presidential campaign; this engagement is a first step toward bringing these populations into an electoral coalition. We pair two massive new data collections—the National Annenberg Election Study capturing public opinion across an entire campaign and The Wisconsin Advertising Project recording and cataloging the political commercials aired by campaigns—to examine how the candidates’ choice of issues affects who gets into the game. We find evidence that appeals to symbolic interests are more likely than appeals to material interest to selectively engage targeted groups.

Getting Out the Vote: Minority Mobilization in a Presidential Election

Despite attempts to mobilize communities of color, gaps in turnout among racial and ethnic minorities persist (e.g., Abrajano et al., J Polit 70:368–382, 2008; Pantoja et al., Polit Res Q 54:729–750, 2001; Kaufmann, Polit Res Q 56:199–210, 2003; Ramirez, Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 601:66–84, 2005, Am Polit Res 35:155–175, 2007). Scholars are only beginning to understand how parties or independent groups seek to mobilize these communities. In this paper, we develop and test the Differential Contact Thesis, which holds that turnout differences between whites and minority groups are influenced both by lower rates of contact by the parties and the use of less effective methods of contact. To test this, we examine data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES), 2004 American National Election Study (ANES), and the 2004 Miami Exit Poll. Our results support the Differential Contact Thesis: even controlling for the initial likelihood to be contacted by the parties, racial and ethnic minorities were less likely to be contacted using the most effective techniques. To some extent, non-partisan contact seems to compensate for the inattention of the major parties toward minority voters, but this contact is less likely to mobilize voters than contact from the parties.

The Economy and the Dynamics of the 2008 Presidential Campaign: Evidence from the National Annenberg Election Study

This paper considers the impact of economic perceptions on vote intention in the 2008 presidential campaign with data from the two components of the National Annenberg Election Survey. It addresses a controversy over whether the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its aftermath altered the terms of competition, and produced the late‐campaign widening of Barack Obama's lead and his comfortable victory. Detailed attention to the chronology of the campaign, made possible by the structure of NAES data collection, indicates that the timing of key shifts is inconsistent with a simple economic interpretation of vote‐intention dynamics. Multivariate analyses indicate that the economy‐vote link weakened at the critical point.

Don’t Expect Too Much! Learning From Late-Night Comedy and Knowledge Item Difficulty

The debate on late night comedy has been inconclusive, with some scholars arguing that this genre increases political knowledge, and others seeing late night comedy as harmful to effective citizenry. We add to the debate and to the research on media effects more generally, by proposing a model that measures political knowledge. The model utilizes item response theory (IRT) to account for individual characteristics, knowledge item difficulty, and response format that influences the likelihood of providing a correct response. Drawing on the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study, we employ this model to test knowledge gain from late night comedy. Using a meta-analysis across 35 political knowledge items, we show that late night comedy increases knowledge, but primarily on easy political items that have fewer correct response options, and mainly among the inattentive citizens. We discuss theoretical implications and provide practical suggestions for scholarship on media effects.

District Complexity as an Advantage in Congressional Elections

Scholars of congressional elections have argued that an increase in constituent diversity increases the level of electoral competition. Following models of boundedly rational candidates, we argue that there is strong reason to believe that the opposite is true. As the complexity of the electoral landscape increases, challengers will have a more difficult time locating an optimal platform when facing an experienced incumbent. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Study, we construct a novel measure of district complexity for U.S. House districts and test whether the entry of quality challengers and the incumbent's share of the two‐party vote are affected by the complexity of the electoral landscape. We find strong support for the hypothesis that complexity benefits incumbents for both indicators of electoral competition, which stands in contrast to most of the existing literature on diversity and incumbent performance.

Modeling Campaign Dynamics on the Web in the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study

In 2000 and 2004, the National Annenberg Election Study (NAES) was an exclusively telephone‐based rolling cross‐section survey. For 2008, the fieldwork strategy is more diverse. This paper outlines the reasoning behind the transition and describes the new structure. Because of declining telephone response rates and diminished coverage of households by landlines, some of the sample has been moved to the web. This also enables the study to leverage the statistical power of its sample through panel re‐interviews, thanks to the high panel retention rate of the web supplier, Knowledge Networks (KN). Each wave will be released as a rolling cross‐section of households in the KN panel, with further provision for replenishment of the sample. Altogether, five waves will be released between October 2006 and January 2009.

Elections: Tax Cut Versus Lockbox: Did the Voters Grasp the Tradeoff in 2000?

The 2000 presidential election was consequential for many reasons, among them being that soon after his inauguration George W. Bush was able to carry out his campaign promise of a large tax cut for all taxpayers. Had the election turned out differently and Al Gore assumed the presidency, he would have certainly vetoed such a bill, as Gore made abundantly clear during the campaign. Even before the first votes were cast in the 2000 presidential primaries, George W. Bush laid out a specific plan for an across-the-board cut in federal income taxes. During the fall campaign, Al Gore sharply criticized Bush's proposal as likely to blow a hole in the federal budget, and expressed outrage that the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers would reap a large share of the benefits. Bush responded that because the government was running a surplus Americans were being overtaxed, and argued that it was surely sensible for the people who pay the most in taxes to get the most back from a tax cut. He pressed the point that the surplus was the people's money, not the federal government's money--and that therefore the people should get it back. Gore's disagreement was not about whose money it was but what should be done with the surplus. In his view, the people would eventually need it to prop up Medicare and Social Security. He therefore proposed that much of the federal budget surplus be set aside for these programs and held in what he termed a In sum, the choice was crystal clear for all to see during the 2000 campaign--a big tax cut for everyone, or setting aside surplus funds for Social Security and Medicare in a lockbox. When Bush emerged victorious he argued that the people who voted for him wanted a tax cut and therefore he had a mandate to deliver just such a policy change, conveniently ignoring the fact that more people voted for his opponent. Had the situation been reversed, Gore would no doubt have said the same about his lockbox proposal. Politicians always claim that people knew what they were voting for when they cast their ballots for them. It would defeat the purpose of democracy for them to do otherwise. After all, they spend countless hours trying to convince people of the wisdom of their policy goals, and it would not make any sense for them to acknowledge that many people were unaware of their platform or did not understand the issues. Scholars, on the other hand, have long been cognizant of the limitations of the public's information about public policy issues, and have frequently challenged politicians' claims of a mandate from the voters for their policies. The long history of research on voting behavior and public opinion should lead anyone to be cautious about concluding that voters in 2000 were casting ballots for Bush or Gore based on their views concerning the crucial issue of a tax cut versus a lockbox. Nevertheless, the degree to which this article finds that voters failed to understand the choices involved is stunning. And even among the voters whose opinions matched up with a candidate, the correspondence between one's vote and one's opinion on this crucial stance was not impressive. Overall, far more survey respondents agreed with Gore's position than Bush's position, thereby making Bush's claim of a mandate to cut federal income taxes seem particularly weak. Data from the 2000 American National Election Study and the National Annenberg Election Study will be analyzed to demonstrate these points. American National Election Study Data In the pre-election wave of the 2000 American National Election Study (ANES), respondents were asked back-to-back questions about the two sides of the tax cut versus lockbox issue. The first question was posed as follows: Recently, there has been a lot of talk about how to spend the extra money the federal government is likely to have in the near future. Some people have proposed that most of the expected federal budget surplus should be used to cut taxes. …