Party Candidates Research Articles

Calling All Disaffected Republicans: Anti-Trump Campaign Messaging During the 2020 Election

The emergence of groups of rogue Republican strategists, such as the Lincoln Project, openly campaigning against the party candidate, Donald Trump, was a unique feature of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. This study content analyzes Twitter campaign messaging (N = 2,317) by two prominent super PACs, the Lincoln Project and Republican Accountability Project (RAP), as they sought to mobilize disaffected republicans and conservative voters against Donald Trump, during the 2020 presidential election. Findings highlight patterns of messaging that support existing research on campaign communication, as well as departures from findings seen in prior work. Further, results showcase patterns of campaign messaging on social media platforms that may be particularly effective at eliciting audience engagement.

Quantifying the uniqueness and divisiveness of presidential discourse

Abstract Do American presidents speak discernibly different from each other? If so, in what ways? And are these differences confined to any single medium of communication? To investigate these questions, this paper introduces a novel metric of uniqueness based on large language models, develops a new lexicon for divisive speech, and presents a framework for assessing the distinctive ways in which presidents speak about their political opponents. Applying these tools to a variety of corpora of presidential speeches, we find considerable evidence that Donald Trump’s speech patterns diverge from those of all major party nominees for the presidency in recent history. Trump is significantly more distinctive than his fellow Republicans, whose uniqueness values appear closer to those of the Democrats. Contributing to these differences is Trump’s employment of divisive and antagonistic language, particularly when targeting his political opponents. These differences hold across a variety of measurement strategies, arise on both the campaign trail and in official presidential addresses, and do not appear to be an artifact of secular changes in presidential communications.

Inter-Candidate Agenda Setting Effect of the 2018 Mexican Presidential Election: Political Party Candidates Vs. an Inde-pendent Candidate

The 2018 Mexican presidential election marked the initiation of a new political communication dynamic in which traditional electoral communication strategies of political parties were challenged by an independent candidate. This study evaluated this innovative electoral setting by examining Telemundo’s electoral coverage of party-affiliated candidates —Anaya Cortés, Meade Kuribreña, and López Obrador— and the independent candidate —Rodríguez Calderón— through agenda setting theory. The data was collected from Telemundo’s national newscast “Noticias Telemundo” with José Díaz Balart during INE’s official 90-day electoral campaign period. The inter-candidate agenda setting effect regarding the horse race topics was strong among the contenders suggesting that Telemundo’s journalists were disseminating the same information regarding party candidates, but the journalists’ reporting differed when covering the independent candidate. Outcomes indicate that there were two dominant political discussions in Telemundo regarding horse race topics, one emerging from all party candidates and the other one from the independent candidate. The inter-candidate agenda setting effect of issues presented strong correlations among all contenders, suggesting that their policy issues news agendas in Telemundo were nearly identical, which could have made it difficult for voters to distinguish among the candidates’ campaign messages. Overall, Rodríguez Calderón challenged parties’ political communication strategies in terms of horse race topics for his ability to disseminate a distinct campaign message in Telemundo despite having acquired the most negative coverage from journalists. But the independent candidate did not represent an opposition for parties regarding issues because his political rhetoric was not dissimilar from the other contenders.

The Government Financial Advantage of Early Elections: Evidence from UK MP Candidate Spending

In many parliamentary democracies, incumbents retain the right to call early elections. This is thought to provide incumbent governments with an advantage due to the ability to time elections to favorable economic conditions. This article explores an additional incumbency advantage of early elections. Due to information asymmetry about election timing, government parties can better plan fundraising in early elections years compared to non-government parties, which gives government parties a relative financial advantage. This proposition is tested on campaign spending data from over 50,000 British parliamentary candidates 1945–2019. The results support the argument. Government party candidates gain a relative financial advantage in early elections years compared to scheduled election years. The effect is found only for non-incumbent candidates and was eliminated by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011, which removed government early election calling. The results suggest that government election calling power provides incumbent government parties with a relative financial advantage.

Implementing ADR for Election Result Disputes Among Party Candidates in the Indonesian House

Implementing ADR for Election Result Disputes Among Party Candidates in the Indonesian House

Challenging and Enhancing Legitimacy Through Humor: A Comparative Study of Candidates’ Use of Humor on Facebook before the 2019 and 2023 Finnish Parliamentary Elections

A prevalent aspect of contemporary digital campaigning is the use of humor to attract attention, elicit amusement, and mark group boundaries. This study investigates the humor in digital campaigns during two recent Finnish parliamentary elections, focusing on how different styles of humor are used to (de)legitimize political ideas and actors. Our original dataset consists of 125,604 posts by 1262 candidates on Facebook six months before the 2019 and 2023 election days. Using Facebook’s haha reactions and manual coding to annotate humor style, we focused on 729 posts with seemingly intentional humor by candidates. We show how different parties and individual candidates used humor to varying degrees and in different styles. Overall, the proportion of humorous posts was not high, but the populist radical right Finns Party candidates used humor by far the most, and their style was primarily aggressive, aimed at delegitimizing the incumbent government, political opponents, and their reference groups. Candidates from other major parties also used some humor, but overall the tone was more positive. Some of these candidates were profiled as “humor specialists” who produced similar combinations of ridicule and anti-elitism as the Finns Party candidates or, alternatively, focused on disseminating self-deprecating and affiliative humor. Affiliative and self-deprecating humor was used to foster closeness, ordinariness, and spontaneity, thus legitimizing oneself as a relatable candidate. The paper discusses how candidates use humor strategically to stand out in a competition for attention between candidates, and elaborates on the implications of using different humor styles in strategic political communication.

CORRUPTION AND POLITICAL PARTY PERFORMANCE IN NIGERIA’S FOURTH REPUBLIC; FOCUS ON PEOPLES DEMOCRATIC PARTY

One of the perennial challenges facing the Nigerian polity is corruption and the political space was not left out in this regard. Despite the fact that political parties are the bedrock of democratic settings as they perform the functions of political recruitment, socialization, articulation as well as strengthening the competition in the political space, lack of ideology, corrupt practices and intra-party contradictions have hindered them from meeting their expectations. This paper interrogated the effects of corruption on political party performance in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic with much focus on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and to proffer solutions on how the menace could be curbed to enhance the internal democracy and potential of the PDP to capture the state power. The paper adopted qualitative research method through the use of secondary data such as journals, textbooks and periodicals and also utilized the clientelism model as a framework of analysis. The study reveals that corruption has eaten deep into the fabric of all democratic institutions in the state including the political parties as the electoral processes have been monetized beyond reasonable doubt. The study, therefore, recommended among others that the democratic institutions in the state such as political parties and the electoral commission be strengthened so as to promote good governance, values ethics and national prosperity. Again, there should be focus on meritocracy in selecting the leadership of political parties and party candidates rather than emphasis on nepotism and relying on patron-client agreements where the patrons decide who and how leaders are elected. This will go along to establish a just, fair and an egalitarian society.

Who Decides? Media, MAGA, Money, and Mentions in the 2022 Republican Primaries

Political elites play an important role in determining who wins primaries, yet comparatively little is known about which voices in party networks matter when different intra-party signals are sent. We examine this question using an original dataset of Republican Senate and gubernatorial primaries in 2022, an election cycle with substantial intra-party conflict in primary elections. We demonstrate that Fox News appearances (media), Trump’s endorsements (MAGA), campaign fundraising (money), and Twitter engagement (mentions) were all positively associated with vote share. We then assess the state of primary fields prior to Trump’s endorsements, showing that endorsed candidates were outperforming their competitors prior to his involvement. Finally, we consider the state of primary fields after Trump endorsed, demonstrating that his support was associated with a thirteen percentage point increase in both fundraising share and polling which lasted through to the primary. These findings provide clarity on the relative weight of different signals in contested party nominations.

Intersecting inequalities in women’s political inclusion in Kenya

ABSTRACT Sub-Saharan Africa has become known for its growing number of women political decision makers, and its progressive policies and laws such as gender quotas. Yet we still do not know enough about how politically active women themselves perceive the challenges and opportunities of being women in politics, and how their experiences differ because of intersecting inequalities. Inspired by the intersectional approach and literature on women and politics in Africa, this article examines politically active women’s perceptions and experiences of electoral politics in Kenya. Through their own stories, it describes how diverse Kenyan women experience political inclusion and exclusion not only as women, but also simultaneously through the complex combinations of such intersecting identities and structural social positionalities as ethnicity and class. Taking party nominations, political campaigning, and electoral violence as examples, the article illustrates how intersecting patterns cross-cut electoral processes. By identifying barriers to their political inclusion, politically active women explain how things should not be, and in doing so, they participate in imagining and outlining new ways of conducting politics in Kenya.

Sport as a Pathway to Political Office and its Gendered Effects

ABSTRACT This paper finds that a background in competitive, organised sports is common among those active in electoral politics. Unique data collected through surveys of federal election candidates and local party association presidents together with the examination of candidate and MP biographies establish that many have a sporting background. This sporting experience offers the opportunity for individuals to acquire skills beneficial to political candidacy and makes them more attractive to party gatekeepers. This paper then connects this, and the significantly lower sports participation rates among women/girls, to their consistent under-representation in the pool of election candidates presented by Canada’s political parties and at every level of our elected legislatures. Women/girls participate in sports at significantly lower levels than men/boys. Men thus benefit disproportionately from both the personal skills developed through sports that lead to formal political participation and the local notoriety desired by party candidate search committees that sports participation offers.

Political Communication Strategy in the 2024 Indonesia’s Presidential Election

In every election, candidates employ various techniques to communicate their mission and vision to their respective voters. Winning an election depends on how good the candidate employs the various tools of communication, using both traditional mass media and social media. This research examines the political communication strategy used by Anies Baswedan during the Indonesian Presidential Election 2024. The objective of this research is to study the political communication style used by Anies Baswedan as a non-party political leader in garnering public support and winning the Presidential Elections. All the other presidential candidates contesting in the election are representing various political parties. All the feeds that were published in his Instagram account during the election were analysed. The analysed data is later triangulated with data from key informants to get an insight on Anies Baswedan’s political thoughts. Data from the Instagram account indicates that his team of communicators employs hashtags, news feed, political ads and visual styles to increase awareness among his voters, in the hope of influencing his voters. The various content published is found to be relevant and significant with the voters but is insufficient to win an election. Although he run initially as a non-political party candidate before gaining endorsement from a political party to run for President, he lost could be due to the lack of political infrastructure support that is needed to ensure his words spread throughout vast Indonesia archipelago. Keywords: Strategy, communication, politics, new media, Presidential Election 2024.

Theatre of the Absurd, Pre-Election Matters and the Future of Democracy in Nigeria: Reflections on APC V Machina

The practice of theatre of the absurd is more present and popular with politicians in Africa than with playwrights. Particularly in Nigeria, the grotesque images and ridiculousness in the utterances of those saddled with the responsibilities of governance can only be viewed as characters in any known absurdist’ play. Nigeria is a nascent democracy, and the 2023 general elections are fraught with inadequacies right from the moment of selection of party candidates through the election proper. Candidates, political parties executives and the court have engineered these inadequacies. The concern of court being the last hope of common man, is on the administration of justice as perceived by parties involved in a case and the society. Therefore, a flawed judgment can only serve to dampen the peoples’ belief in the sanctity of the judiciary. On 28th May 2022, Bashir Machina contested and won the All Progressive Congress’s Yobe North Senatorial primary election unopposed, and in June the same year, the political party submitted the name of Ahmad Lawan to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as its candidate for the main election into the Senate. In the ensuing litigation, both lower court and court of appeal affirmed the authentic candidacy of Machina, however, the Supreme Court in its judgment, affirmed Ahmad Lawan as the APC candidate for the election to the Senate. It is against this background that this study examines APC v Machina and argued that in this particular case, justice has been perceived not to have been done by the large segment of the society based on the peoples reaction in the media. We conclude that the five justices of the Supreme Court with divided resolution of three against two, and other participants in the litigation, merely represent different characters of an absurd drama fit only for the stage.

Mode of candidacy, electoral prospects, and the ideological deviation of candidacy-seeking politicians from their party leadership

Politicians who seek their parties' nomination as candidates for public office start communicating their ideological profile to the selectorate months before the party decides on who will run as candidates. However, some politicians tend to steer away from their party leadership, while others stick closer to the party line. We argue that not only the mode of candidacy but one's expected chances of winning the election during the candidate selection period are defining factors in understanding why some candidates deviate further from their party leadership position than others. We use novel data on the degree of intra-party competition among the main German parties in all 299 electoral districts and on the ideological positions of candidates, measured using their Twitter statements in the run-up to the 2021 Bundestag election, to evaluate our expectations. In line with existing studies, we find that candidates who seek only their party's nomination via lists deviate less from party leadership than candidates who seek nomination as a district candidate. In contrast to our expectations, candidates who seek their nomination in an electoral district do not deviate more ideologically from their party when they can expect to win the district seat on election day based on published polls during the candidate selection period.

Tribal Politics or Discerning Voters? Party and Policy in Local Elections

How do voters react to local candidates who share their policy views but not their party identification, and vice versa? This paper presents findings from a survey experiment that cross-pressured respondents to choose between a co-partisan candidate who does not share their policy views (on housing and homelessness) and an opposing party candidate with some ideological affinity. The majority of respondents chose party over policy, indicating they would vote for co-partisans even if the candidate from the opposing party is closer to their policy positions. However, significant minorities defected and in some circumstances most did. Weak partisans, those with stronger policy views, and those who viewed the issues as highly salient were more likely to defect from their party when cross-pressured. Our findings support revising the expectation that partisanship always takes precedence over policy views and reinforces the view that partisanship may operate differently at the local level.

Lexicographic Preferences in Candidate Choice. How Party Affiliation Dominates Gender and Race

Abstract Understanding which political candidates are elected for office is fundamental to democracy and political science. Whereas there is much agreement that party affiliation is one of the most important candidate characteristics to voters, evidence regarding the gender and race of the candidate is mixed. We suggest voters have lexicographic preferences, meaning they rank their preferences and focus primarily on the candidate's party affiliation. Second-order preferences such as gender and race are mostly necessary when there is a tie in first-order preferences when voters choose between two same-party candidates or have no party information. We show how conjoint experiments can be used to test for lexicographic preferences and use data from a US-representative sample and a pre-registered replication to confirm that in the United States, gender and race are second-order preferences. Lexicographic preferences provide a theoretical lens explaining some of the mixed results of gender and race in the candidate literature.

Inflation in 2022 did not affect congressional voting, but abortion did

This study examines voting in the 2022 United States congressional elections, contests that were widely expected to produce a sizable defeat for Democratic candidates for largely economic reasons. Based on a representative national probability sample of voters interviewed in both 2020 and 2022, individuals who changed their vote from one party's congressional candidate to another party's candidate did not do so in response to the salience of inflation or declining economic conditions. Instead, we find strong evidence that views on abortion were central to shifting votes in the midterm elections. Americans who favored (opposed) legal abortions were more likely to shift from voting for Republican (Democratic) candidates in 2020 to Democratic (Republican) candidates in 2022. Since a larger number of Americans supported than opposed legal abortions, the combination of these shifts ultimately improved the electoral prospects of Democratic candidates. New voters were especially likely to weigh abortion views heavily in their vote-shifting calculus. Likewise, those respondents whose confidence in the US Supreme Court declined from 2020 to 2022 were more likely to shift from voting for Republican to Democratic congressional candidates. We provide direct empirical evidence that changes in support for the Supreme Court, a nonpartisan branch of the federal government, are implicated in partisan voting behavior in another branch of government. We explore the implications of these findings for prevalent assumptions about how economic conditions influence voting, as well as for the relationship between the judiciary and electoral politics.

Election Optimizer Algorithm: A New Meta-Heuristic Optimization Algorithm for Solving Industrial Engineering Design Problems

This paper introduces the election optimization algorithm (EOA), a meta-heuristic approach for engineering optimization problems. Inspired by the democratic electoral system, focusing on the presidential election, EOA emulates the complete election process to optimize solutions. By simulating the presidential election, EOA introduces a novel position-tracking strategy that expands the scope of effectively solvable problems, surpassing conventional human-based algorithms, specifically, the political optimizer. EOA incorporates explicit behaviors observed during elections, including the party nomination and presidential election. During the party nomination, the search space is broadened to avoid local optima by integrating diverse strategies and suggestions from within the party. In the presidential election, adequate population diversity is maintained in later stages through further campaigning between elite candidates elected within the party. To establish a benchmark for comparison, EOA is rigorously assessed against several renowned and widely recognized algorithms in the field of optimization. EOA demonstrates superior performance in terms of average values and standard deviations across the twenty-three standard test functions and CEC2019. Through rigorous statistical analysis using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test at a significance level of 0.05, experimental results indicate that EOA consistently delivers high-quality solutions compared to the other benchmark algorithms. Moreover, the practical applicability of EOA is assessed by solving six complex engineering design problems, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Do Turkey's 2024 Local Elections Signal the End of Erdoğan's Reign?

AbstractThe unexpected victory of the opposition Republican People's Party in Turkey's March 31 municipal elections raises intriguing questions about the future of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after more than two decades of his rule. Just 10 months after Erdoğan won a new term, a significant portion of the electorate voted against him and his Justice and Development Party, marking his largest defeat ever. The president acknowledged the significance of the defeat, describing the results as “not only a loss of votes but also a loss of soul and blood.” This article analyzes the factors that drove the outcome and contends that this was more a protest of the Turkish strongman than an approval of opposition policies. The people voted against Erdoğan's arrogance and authoritarian style, as well as the poor quality of his party's candidates; the worsening economy, especially for retirees; and perceptions of a deteriorating justice system. The main opposition party also benefited from skillful leadership less than a year after its defeat in the presidential election. While the outcome of the 2024 vote signals a desire for democratic governance and accountability, it remains uncertain at this early stage whether this is a temporary deviation.

Godfatherism and Democratic Reconstruction in Nigeria: A Review of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

Much of the contemporary discourse on Nigeria's democracy and politics from 1999 till date has at its centre, the phenomenon of 'godfatherism' in the leadership of political parties, and in running the affairs of our multi-nation-state. As a result of the corruption of the electoral and political processes, governmental structures, electoral politics and state power are skewed towards satisfying the self- regarding interests of the dominant political mentors otherwise known as 'political godfathers'. Relying on their wealth and their political machines, they secure party nomination for candidates of their choice by any means, sponsor their election, including manipulating the electoral process. This paper is intended to examine critically the crisis of political godfatherism in Nigeria and its implications for the future of the nation's democracy. It suggests ways the gods of Nigerian democracy and politics can be checked and confronted if the country is to deepen democracy and strengthen democratic institutions.

Addressing Barriers to Women's Representation in Party Candidate Selections

AbstractAn analysis of Conservative and Labour Party candidate selections reveals persistent gender disparities, with the Conservative Party nominating a significantly higher proportion of men. While various factors, such as local connections and harassment, abuse and intimidation (HAI) are cited as explanations, they fail to address systemic issues within the Conservative Party's recruitment processes and organisational culture. This article argues that the focus should shift from individual women to party structures and practices that perpetuate gender inequality. Drawing on previous research and empirical evidence, it calls for institutional reforms including the implementation of quotas and greater transparency in candidate selection. Finally, it calls for a gender‐sensitive audit of party culture to address underlying barriers to women's participation in politics.