Party Messages Research Articles

Political communities on Facebook across 28 European countries

Studies show that political campaigns are increasingly developing a digital strategy to convert their social media followers into agents of the campaign. Remediation of content offers the potential to accelerate the reach of party messages, and there is evidence that this has real world impact. In a comparative examination of all parties standing for the 2014 election to the European parliament, we find that parties with existing large support bases are the most likely to benefit from the potential offered by social media. Having a large number of followers means benefiting from greater prominence by captivating more activists. There is some evidence of “equalisation”, however. Parties with pro or anti-EU stances have the highest percentage of activists within their followership but also attract the largest numbers of those who only comment. We suggest, therefore, that while there is evidence that strong ideological commitment motivates activists, it also generates adversarial dynamics. Qualitative research is required to extend these findings as to understand the nature of online discourse across party social media pages.

Taking official positions: How public policy preferences influence the platforms of parties in the United States

Do political parties in the United States respond to public opinion when writing their official party platforms? Current research suggests a clear linkage between public opinion and party positions, with parties responding to public preferences, and public opinion responding to party messages. Drawing on existing research regarding the saliency/issue competition model of party position-taking, this study examines the specific effect of public opinion on party positions, positing that when a larger percentage of the public views a particular issue area as important, political parties will discuss that issue area to a greater degree in their official election platforms. To test this theoretical construct, we rely on public opinion data collected by Gallup, and normalized by the Policy Agendas Project, from 1947 through 2011, combined with content analyzed data regarding both the Republican and Democratic platforms from 1948 through 2012. Using OLS regression with a Prais-Winsten transformation and panel-corrected standard errors, we find support for the hypothesis that political parties discuss, in their platforms, issue areas that the public views as more important. Further, we find that this responsiveness does not appear to vary across political parties. These findings have important implications for our understandings of both political party dynamics and party representation in the United States. Moreover, these findings allow us to assess the health of American democracy.

TCBH Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2017: The 'Progress of a Slogan': Youth, Culture, and the Shaping of Everyday Political Languages in Late 1940s Britain.

In 1948, worried that young people would take full employment and the welfare state for granted, the Labour Party trialled a new slogan: 'Ask your Dad'. This slogan encouraged the young to learn about the hardships which their parents had experienced in the inter-war years, largely under Conservative governments. Using archived interviews and letters sent to the press, this article provides the first study of the popular reception of this slogan. Most people had not heard of this slogan, and most of those who had heard of the phrase showed no knowledge that it was associated with politics, turning instead to popular culture. Those who understood the slogan were not the passive conduits of their party's message; often, they reworked political ideas to fit their own memories. Because repeating slogans was associated with a lack of political independence, not listening to party politics could conceal an intense interest in creating political change-an attitude which was, apparently, pronounced amongst the young. This article uses these responses to suggest how political language was as much produced by ordinary people's memories and daily discussion, as it was something drawn from professional campaigners.

Decentralization through Party Decentralization in Korea: Party Message, Political and Fiscal Decentralization

Decentralization through Party Decentralization in Korea: Party Message, Political and Fiscal Decentralization

Symbols of priority? How the media selectively report on parties’ election campaigns

AbstractLeaders and members of parliament serve as a political party's public face. Their image casts a shadow in which observers interpret policy statements. It is hypothesized in this article that media cover and voters understand policy messages through the lens of prominent party members’ characteristics. Easy‐to‐observe descriptive traits, such as gender or ethnicity, cue parties’ policy priorities. Media are more likely to emphasise party messages on issues historically related to these groups when they are visible in the party's public image. Hypotheses from this theory are tested using data on prominent party members’ descriptive characteristics, policy statements and media coverage of statements from the European Election Studies. Data from the 1999, 2004 and 2009 European elections evidence support for the theory. Parties with more female representatives signal stronger emphasis on gendered issues in media reports. The results hold implications for understanding the ways in which parties deliver and voters receive campaign messages. This research offers an explanation for voters’ limited knowledge of parties’ policy positions; media reinforce existing gender stereotypes and voters’ predispositions by selectively reporting policy statements.

Who Gets into the Papers? Party Campaign Messages and the Media

Parties and politicians want their messages to generate media coverage and thereby reach voters. This article examines how attributes related to content and sender affect whether party messages are likely to get media attention. Based on content analyses of 1,613 party press releases and 6,512 media reports in a parliamentary, multiparty context, we suggest that party messages are more likely to make it into the news if they address concerns that are already important to the media or other parties. Discussing these issues may particularly help opposition parties and lower-profile politicians get media attention. These results confirm the importance of agenda setting and gatekeeping, shed light on the potential success of party strategies, and have implications for political fairness and representation.

Partisan Bias in Message Selection: Media Gatekeeping of Party Press Releases

Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general.

Internal Party Bulletin or Paper of the Working Class Movement?

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, the Daily Worker was very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement.

What Makes Party Messages Fit for Reporting? An Experimental Study of Journalistic News Selection

Studies on news values have provided many insights into what gets reported in the media. In this study we use the concept of news values to examine how journalists perceive the newsworthiness of party messages. Taking an innovative approach, fictional party press releases are used to test for the influence of five important news values in the context of political news in a factorial survey experiment. This allows us to study those news values in relation to one another in a controlled experimental setting, an advantage over traditional gatekeeping studies. Political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands were asked to indicate whether they would consider these press releases for reporting or not. Findings show that the power status of the party, unexpectedness, and the magnitude of the political action announced influence journalists’ perception of newsworthiness. Messages from parties that were part of government were more likely to be selected for coverage in the Netherlands, whereas the party did not matter in Switzerland, where power is distributed more evenly. This shows that political system characteristics influence the work of journalists. Opposed to results from content analyses of news output, some news values (personal status, conflict) did not prove to be relevant. In the conclusion section we elaborate on potential explanations.

Shallow or Rational Public Spheres? Indonesian Political Parties in the Twitter-Sphere

Abstract Despite the impressive democratic gains of the Indonesian political system since the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime, a noted weakness of the current political party system is the lack of clear ideological positions across parties and the difficulty that voters face in differentiating policy programs in order to hold parties accountable. Yet, with the increasing popularity of social media, new channels of communication are opening up between political parties and their constituents, reshaping Indonesia’s political communication landscape. This raises the question of whether these new forms of media offer spaces that allow, or even encourage, parties to articulate ideological positions and discuss issues of public concern with constituents. This paper addresses this question through a mixed-methods analysis of how political parties are using the popular social media website Twitter and how users are responding to party messaging strategies. Based on a content analysis of party messages, qualitative observation of party-constituent interactions, and a quantitative analysis of user response, the findings suggest that there is reason for modest optimism that the medium of Twitter encourages a less superficial brand of party communication. Whereas other studies have found that the goals or the size of the party as the best explanation for the social media strategy and performance, the Indonesian case suggests that parties that attempt to differentiate themselves ideologically, regardless of their ideological content, and engage the public directly perform better on Twitter. It also finds that tweets about electoral politics receive the most reaction from users. This suggests that Twitter is a medium that will reward more programmatic and engaged party messaging, with potentially positive impacts on the Indonesian political communications landscape.

Quality Controlled: An Ethnographic Account of Tea Party Messaging and Action

What strategies do Tea Party movement organizers use to achieve frame alignment, that is, uniformity of grievance, purpose, and action, with their participants? Evidence to answer this question is gathered from a year‐length participant‐observation case study of one city‐based Tea Party organization, primarily through the meetings of its localized grassroots chapters. Principal findings are that Tea Party organizers employ quality control of off‐message grievances, for example, abortion, as well as any action or communication that would or could be perceived as racially prejudicial, or otherwise inflammatory. Formally, these findings demonstrate the influence of organizational hierarchy on grassroots practice. Substantively, they demonstrate the complex relationship between a broader conservative ideological repertoire as empirically deployed by participants, and the more focused frame alignment attempts of a particular social movement organization. In short, the findings elucidate the importance of interaction and organizational structure as they influence social movement messaging and action.

The Limits of Issue Ownership Dynamics: The Constraining Effect of Party Preference

Issue ownership theory argues that when a voter considers a party to be the most competent amongst others to deal with an issue (that is, the party “owns” the issue), chances are the voter will vote for that party. Recent work has shown that perceptions of issue ownership are dynamic: they are affected by the media coverage of party messages. However, based on the broad literature on partisan bias, we predict that parties' efforts to change issue ownership perceptions will have a difficult time breaching the perceptual screen created by a voter's party preference. Using two separate experiments with a similar design we show that the effect of partisan issue messages on issue competence is moderated by party preference. The effect of issue messages is reinforced when people already like a party, and blocked when people dislike a party.

The Growth of Third-Party Voting: An Empirical Case Study of Vermont, 1840–55

AbstractThis article seeks to uncover reasons behind the relatively high levels of third-party voting found at the state level in the early- to mid-1800s. I argue that third parties needed to develop localized bases of support from which they could expand. By analyzing Liberty Party gubernatorial voting in Vermont during the 1840s, the article shows that the party developed support in particular towns, maintained this over election cycles, and spread the party message to neighboring towns after the creation of a formal party organization. I also find that towns with strong Liberty Party support in the early 1840s continued to be strong supporters of the Free Soil Party in the 1850s. I then present evidence that early bases of Liberty Party support tended to vote at much higher levels for the Republican Party in 1855, indicating that the geographic development of an abolitionist party in the early 1840s helped in the establishment of Republican success in Vermont. These findings highlight the importance of geographic context in the development of third-party voting in the early- to mid-1800s and its connection to the rise of the Republican Party.

Public opinion, party messages, and responsibility for the financial crisis in Britain

The political consequences of the crisis in world financial markets are only beginning to be understood. In this article, we take up one of these many repercussions by examining public beliefs of who’s to blame for a complex and unparalleled set of events. Analyses of survey data from Britain find that while most assign responsibility for the crisis to market actors, the likelihood of blaming governments, as opposed to blaming banks and investors, is greater among low sophisticates and Conservative Party identifiers. We further show how elite messages from competing political elites evolved over-time and were reflected in mass beliefs about the crisis. Results highlight the centrality of partisan cues and, in particular, of political sophistication in understanding the dynamics of responsibility attributions. Lastly, we estimate the consequences of blaming the government for the crisis for voter choice.

Turning the Tables: Individual Contributions, Member Contributions, and the Changing Campaign Finance Environment

The BCRA soft money ban enacted in 2002 posed a serious challenge to Democrats. Could they compete in fundraising with the Republicans in a hard money only environment? Some even went so far as to suggest that BCRA was a "suicide bill" for the Democrats. Such dire predictions have not proven true. Democrats have exploited good candidates, strong party committee leadership, messaging, and technology to be competitive with the Republican Party overall in fundraising among individuals. The surge in individual donors to the Democrats is most pronounced in the 2008 presidential race but extends to the two congressional campaign committees as well.

Testing Zaller’s Reception and Acceptance Model in an Intense Election Campaign

The paper provides a test of Zaller’s reception and acceptance model. The theory describes conditions under which a political message is received, and, if received, accepted or rejected. The study deals with the 1988 Canadian election that was fiercely fought over one central issue, the Free Trade Accord with the United States. We use the 1988 Canadian Election Study campaign rolling cross-section survey, and we test Zaller’s propositions about who is most likely to receive and then accept party messages. Our findings provide little support for the model. We suggest that when an issue is hotly debated in an election campaign voters who receive party messages are able to connect these messages to their values and predispositions whatever their level of political awareness.

Mohamed Saliou Camara. His Master's Voice: Mass Communication and Single Party Politics in Guinea Under Sékou Touré. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005. xvi + 217 pp. Index. $24.95. Paper.

Mohamed Saliou Camara. His Master's Voice: Mass Communication and Single Party Politics in Guinea Under Sékou Touré. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005. xvi + 217 pp. Index. $24.95. Paper. - Volume 49 Issue 3

Playing Politics: Videogames for Politics, Activism, and Advocacy

Videogames have dominated popular culture for some time, but only in 2004 did they make a significant break into the world of politics, advocacy, and activism. This paper provides an overview of a variety of types of games used for political speech, from endorsed party messages to activist dissent. After explaining the state of the field, I discuss approaches to design and measure success for such artifacts. While some political opinion is black and white, most issues occupy grey areas, heavily influenced by other public policy issues. Can healthcare reform really be separated from taxation, national budgeting, tort reform, and social security reform? Far from neatly isolated problems, policy issues are complex systems that recombine and interrelate with one another. In particular, I will interrogate how videogames afford a new perspective on political issues, since they are especially effective at representing complex systems. Central to the process of creating and understanding such games is an understanding of “procedural rhetoric” — the way that a videogame embodies ideology in its computational structure. By understanding how games express rhetoric in their rules, we not only gain a critical vantage point on videogame artifacts, but also we can begin to consider how to design games whose primary purpose is to editorialize, teach, and make political statements.

A Bayesian Learning Model with Applications to Party Identification

Previous research has suggested that party labels operate like brand names that citizens use to inform their votes. The article argues that this earlier work has focused too much on the content of party messages, while the informational value of party labels also depends on voter uncertainty about the party's behavior in office. These intuitions are developed in a Bayesian learning model in which voters update their beliefs about the mean and variance in the distribution of parties' ideologies, and apply these beliefs to a spatial model of partisan choice with risk-averse voters. The model predicts that if party unity is high, then party labels will provide a useful signal to voters about candidate characteristics and identifications with the parties will be strong, but if party unity is low, then party attachments will be weak. This approach seems to explain both the stability in respondents' political preferences over the life-cycle and the decline and resurgence in the strength of party identifications in the American electorate over the last half-century.

BASIC OPERATIONS AMONG ENTANGLED STATES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS TO QUANTUM PROTOCOLS

It is thought that the techniques operating entangled states are some of the principal ones in quantum information processing. Therefore, procedures constructing other types of entangled states from some entangled states are useful. In this paper, we first show methods that dynamically change the number of entangled qubits during communication. Next, we propose a sharing protocol called the anonymous entangled state sharing protocol. By using this protocol, a party's message can be split among unknown parties because the parties can share entangled states without knowing each other. Finally, we show protocols that can recover an original message and split it to other parties without revealing its shared messages.