Presidential Primaries Research Articles

The 2016 Republican primary campaign on Twitter: Issues and ideological positioning for the profiles of Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump

The 2016 Republican primaries, marked by Trump’s controversial remarks and the dialectical confrontations between contenders, were mirrored on Twitter. This social network became the arena in which the candidates were able to express their views on different aspects and share with their potential voters both their concerns and the issues that would be the core of their electoral program if they were elected as the republican nominee. This paper analyzes the tweets published by the four best positioned candidates in the Iowa polls (Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump), whose Caucus marks the beginning of the presidential primaries and whose results usually indicate how the presidential race is going to evolve, in the months prior to the beginning of the process and examines the main elements on which their respective campaigns were based and the ideological lines traced by each one on key issues for the Republican electorate, among other issues. The results introduce some of the electoral promises with which the winner of the primaries convinced the US voters to reach the Presidency.

Appeals to the Hispanic demographic: Targeting through Facebook autoplay videos by the Clinton campaign during the 2015/2016 presidential primaries

By looking at the autoplay videos posted and shared on Hillary Clinton’s Facebook account during the 2015/2016 primary election season, this article offers much-needed insight into the communication aspect of campaign targeting. Using data analysis extracted from the leading social media platform, the article examines what groups of Hispanic Facebook users were attracted to Clinton’s targeted autoplay videos, what elements within these videos best enticed these people into liking the videos, and if the Clinton campaign appeared to learn what types of autoplay videos were most effective over the course of the primary season.

A quantum theory account of order effects and conjunction fallacies in political judgments.

Are our everyday judgments about the world around us normative? Decades of research in the judgment and decision-making literature suggest the answer is no. If people's judgments do not follow normative rules, then what rules if any do they follow? Quantum probability theory is a promising new approach to modeling human behavior that is at odds with normative, classical rules. One key advantage of using quantum theory is that it explains multiple types of judgment errors using the same basic machinery, unifying what have previously been thought of as disparate phenomena. In this article, we test predictions from quantum theory related to the co-occurrence of two classic judgment phenomena, order effects and conjunction fallacies, using judgments about real-world events (related to the U.S. presidential primaries). We also show that our data obeys two a priori and parameter free constraints derived from quantum theory. Further, we examine two factors that moderate the effects, cognitive thinking style (as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test) and political ideology.

Meme-ing Electoral Participation

In February 2016, the Washington Post characterized the presidential primaries as “the most-memed election in U.S. history.” During the election year, meme-ing related to the major candidates became hugely popular and engaged various groups of people who were not ordinarily involved in bipartisan political processes. As brief, to the point, and quickly modifiable visual-textual messages, Internet memes were a particularly apt way to illustrate the most contested hot-button issues that emerged during the 2016 presidential race. This article considers the phenomenon of meme-ing in relation to both the Republican and Democratic campaigns. In particular, it focuses on memes that called attention to the candidates’ contradictory or incongruous statements critiquing their policy positions. The article demonstrates the ways in which memes spoke to the intersection of electoral activism and cultural representations in several ways: they enabled users to rapidly take a stand on and react to developing political events in real time; they provided alternative parallel discourses to mainstream media viewpoints; and they enabled mobilizing voters outside of official political discourses. During the 2016 campaign, meme-ing served as an example of a politico-cultural discourse that exemplified the unusual election year in ways that conventional political analysis alone was not able to capture.

Campaigning and election outcomes in a presidential primary election

ABSTRACTThis article presents new evidence from the US presidential primary setting on the role campaigning plays in determining election outcomes. Using candidate visits as a measure of campaign intensity, I estimate a discrete choice model of voting using a differentiated products framework where I allow for abstention and create instruments for campaigning based on Democratic Party rules for delegate allocation. On average, a visit by a candidate increases the vote share of this candidate by about 2.4 percentage points and decreases the abstaining share by 0.7 percentage points.

Appeals to the Hispanic Demographic: Targeting through Facebook Autoplay Videos by the Clinton Campaign during the 2015/2016 Presidential Primaries

By looking at the autoplay videos posted and shared on Hillary Clinton’s Facebook account during the 2015/2016 primary election season, this article offers much needed insight into the communication aspect of campaign targeting. Using data analysis extracted from the leading social media platform, the article examines what groups of Hispanic Facebook users were attracted to Clinton’s targeted autoplay videos, what elements within these videos best enticed these people into liking the videos, and if the Clinton campaign appeared to learn what types of autoplay videos were most effective over the course of the primary season.

Tracking geographical locations using a geo-aware topic model for analyzing social media data

Tracking how discussion topics evolve in social media and where these topics are discussed geographically over time has the potential to provide useful information for many different purposes. In crisis management, knowing a specific topic's current geographical location could provide vital information to where, or even which, resources should be allocated. This paper describes an attempt to track online discussions geographically over time. A distributed geo-aware streaming latent Dirichlet allocation model was developed for the purpose of recognizing topics' locations in unstructured text. To evaluate the model it has been implemented and used for automatic discovery and geographical tracking of election topics during parts of the 2016 American presidential primary elections. It was shown that the locations correlated with the actual election locations, and that the model provides a better geolocation classification compared to using a keyword-based approach.

Party Animals of the 2016 Presidential Primaries: Political Cartoon Representations of the Republican and Democratic Parties

This analysis of political cartoon coverage of the 2016 presidential primaries found considerable attention given to the political parties themselves, as well as issues, and controversies the parties were facing. In political cartoons, the Republican and Democratic parties were usually reflected in animal representations of the elephant and donkey. A qualitative textual analysis of cartoon images from U.S. newspapers found a number of themes emerged in 2016 with regard to the party animals: Both parties were portrayed expressing reluctance or hesitancy in their party’s nominee, the Republican Party in particular was represented as helpless to stop the political success that Donald Trump saw in the primaries, and the Democratic Party was portrayed as divided between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. These themes found in political cartoon images suggest how the two dominant political parties operate in electoral politics today.

미국 대통령 예비선거에 적용한 시공간 의존성을 고려한 자기로지스틱 회귀모형 연구

미국 대통령 예선은 선거인단이 시차를 두고 여러 회에 걸쳐 진행되는 특징이 있음에도 많은 연구가 진행되지 않았다. 본 연구에서는 다양한 자기로지스틱 모형을 통해 미국 대통령 예비선거 결과와 사회경제적 변수간의 시공간 의존성의 관계를 파악하고자 한다. 2016년 데이터에 적용한 분석결과 각 카운티의 노년층, 흑인, 여성 그리고 히스패닉 인구 비율이 높은 지역일수록 힐러리 클린턴을 지지할 확률이 높은 것으로 나타났다. 또한, 주변 카운티에서 많은 지지를 받은 후보가 이웃 지역에서도 많이 지지를 받을 확률이 높고 이전 선거에서 많은 지지를 받는 것과 다음 선거 지역의 결과 간의 상관관계도 확인되었다. 시공간 의존성을 알아보기 위한 모형 중에서 슈퍼화요일의 선거 결과가 이후 선거와 관련이 있다고 가정한 모형의 설명력이 가장 높은 것으로 판명되었다. The US presidential primaries take place sequentially in different places with a time lag. However, they have not attracted as much attention in terms of modelling as the US presidential election has. This study applied several autologistic models to find the relation between the outcome of the primary election for a Democrat candidate with socioeconomic attributes in consideration of spatial and temporal dependence. According to the result applied to the 2016 election data at the county level, Hillary Clinton was supported by people in counties with high population rates of old age, Black, female and Hispanic. In addition, spatial dependence was observed, representing that people were likely to support the same candidate who was supported from neighboring counties. Positive auto-correlation was also observed in the time-series of the election outcome. Among several autologistic models of this study, the model specifying the effect of Super Tuesday had the best fit.

Predicting Presidential Election Outcomes from What People Watch.

In a recent article by Barfar and Padmanabhan (2015), we demonstrated how television viewership data could predict presidential election outcomes in the United States. In this article, we examine predictive models using a snapshot of Nielsen's national data on television viewership. The study is conducted with high-dimensional low sample size (HDLSS) data, whereby we conduct a comparative analysis with and without feature reduction on the data from the 2012 elections. We find that simple "single-show models" often provided more insights and predictive accuracies than models from feature reduction. Second, beyond the state and county levels of analysis, we show that the results continue to hold at the designated market area (DMA) level, crucial for television broadcasting because programs are often targeted at the DMA level. Finally, we examine the performance of the single-show models in the 2016 election season by applying them to the viewership information during the U.S. presidential primaries. We discuss implications of our findings for research and practice.

Analysis of the style and the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential primaries

Analysis of the style and the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential primaries

Campaign Conversations on Instagram and the Closure of Access to Social Media Data

This paper extends existing research about the use of social media in the context of political elections by presenting results from an exploratory social network analysis study of the use of the Instagram platform by candidates in the U.S. Presidential primary elections. Although Instagram is generally considered a visual platform, certain technological affordances provide to users a platform for conversation and interaction. Findings from this study suggest that Instagram’s conversational features are similar in their affordances to other social media platforms, and as a result, participation and the resulting trace data and networks resemble what has been observed on other platforms. While prior research largely ignores the conversational and social network aspects of the platform, the preliminary findings introduced here suggest that within the limits of what data is accessible through its API, Instagram supports the construction and analysis of social and communication networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the API limitations and recent changes that negatively impact and possibly prevent the data-scientific study of social media-enabled political networks on the Instagram platform.

Segmenting Clinton and Obama Voters

The purpose of this case is to introduce data visualization, advanced regression techniques, and supervised learning. Students are asked to visualize data geographically and in scatterplots. They will use stepwise regression and regression trees to select a predictive model for forecasting data in a holdout sample. In a forecasting competition, they will submit their models to be tested for accuracy. Supervised learning techniques—such as training, validation, and testing—are introduced. Regression trees serve as both predictive and graphical tools for communicating insights from data analysis to a decision maker. Excerpt UVA-QA-0807 Rev. Sept. 21, 2017 SEGMENTING CLINTON AND OBAMA VOTERS It was February 19, 2008. One week earlier, Barack Obama had taken the lead in the delegate count during the Democratic Party's presidential primaries, the winner of which would face the Republican Party's nominee in the general election to become the next president of the United States (POTUS). On that day in February, Hillary Clinton, Obama's primary opponent, began running ads in Ohio aimed at middle-class, blue-collar voters. One ad, “Night Shift,” closed showing Clinton at her desk: “She understands. She's worked the night shift, too.” But had Clinton ever worked the night shift? Her spokesperson said it was a “rhetorical reference” to working late nights as a lawyer, First Lady, and senator. Clinton was not alone in her awkward appeals to voters in key demographics. Months earlier at a campaign stop in Iowa, Obama noted that while produce prices had risen in grocery stores, farmers had not benefited from increases in crop prices: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff.” At the time, there wasn't a single Whole Foods in the state of Iowa. . . .

Murray N. Rothbard’s Paleolibertarianism. In Search for a Political Success during the Republican Party Presidential Primaries 1992

Any evaluation of paleolibertarianism must be twofold. As it has been touched upon at the beginning of this article, it would be a good idea to view paleolibertarianism from two angles. As a political proposition, related to the “here and now” in which it came to be, as well as a theory of its own, the way it was expressed by Rothbard and Rockwell, it contributed something new to the already diverse tree of libertarianism. The first assessment must be mixed, partly negative. It is not so straightforward to assess paleolibertarianism as an idea. Its this potential was never squandered, thanks to the continued activities of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Rothbard’s work is being continued. And for the libertarian movement as a whole, it is advantageous that its individual parts clearly indicate the similarities and difference between them. Libertarianism is a young ideology, and an internal debate, and Rothbard’s legacy invites one, can only serve to further the cause of liberty.

Sometimes It Does Matter: The 2016 Presidential Primary Election in Pennsylvania

Since the first presidential primary was held in Pennsylvania in the spring of 1912, rarely has the state truly impacted the race. A combination of forces, notably the rather late date that it has traditionally been scheduled relative to other states has all but guaranteed that the presumptive nominees of the Democratic and Republican Parties have long ago been selected. As long as this remains the case, it’s difficult to imagine the state’s voters ever being able to winnow a field of candidates, no matter how large or small it is. However, on rare occasions, the lateness of the Pennsylvania’s primary election allows the state’s voters to be one, if not the deciding force on who lays final claim to the nomination. Such was the case on April 24, 2016, when Pennsylvanians essentially settled the contest on both sides, elevating Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump toward their ultimate nominations.

Netflix and Engage? Implications for Streaming Television on Political Participation during the 2016 US Presidential Campaign

A large body of existing research has consistently demonstrated that the use of social networking sites (SNS) by citizens in elections is positively related to different forms of both offline and online participation. The opposite argument, however, is often advanced with regard to increased viewing broadcast or cable television, particularly entertainment programming. This study proceeds from this broad vantage point by examining survey-based indicators of active SNS use and conventional television viewing in the 2016 presidential primaries, as well as the frequency of streaming television viewing during the early stages of this campaign. Data for this study was drawn from a representative nationwide online panel, and findings observed here suggest that more personalized communication through the ongoing morphology of social networking sites and streaming both political and apolitical television content are significant factors in positively shaping both online and offline participation. Comparisons with other media including conventional television viewing are introduced, and theoretical implications from a media system dependency framework are discussed.

Watching Election 2016 with a Gender Lens

The presence of women candidates in both major parties’ presidential primaries, including a likely woman Democratic nominee, has increased the attention paid to gender dynamics in the 2016 US presidential election. However, the presumption that previous presidential elections—without female prominent contenders—were gender neutral is false: gender dynamics have been at play in all US presidential elections to date. The nation’s top executive office is arguably the most masculine in American politics. Duerst-Lahti (1997) describes the presidency as a gendered space in which masculine norms and images are reified as the ideal, adding, “the masculinist assumption-made-normal is strong and is made even stronger when it goes unnoticed for its gendered aspects” (22). Presidents and presidential contenders, whether male or female, are expected to meet the masculine expectations of the office through words and actions, and those around them—family, spouses, and advisors—often play a role in shaping the degree to which they are successful. In navigating American politics, candidates also face gendered treatment by opponents, voters, and media, reminding us that presidential politics is far from gender neutral. These gender dynamics have been detailed by scholars, particularly in analyses of the presidential candidacies of women (Beail and Longworth 2013; Carlin and Winfrey 2009; Carroll and Dittmar 2009; Dittmar and Carroll 2013; Duerst-Lahti 2013; Falk 2010; Han and Heldman 2007; Heldman, Carroll, and Olson 2005; Lawrence and Rose 2009; McClain, Carter, and Brady 2005). However, the depth and nuance in scholarly analyses are rarely evident in popular dialogue about the ways in which gender shapes presidential elections.

Presidential Primary Turnout 1972–2016

ABSTRACTWe explore the implications of sequential presidential primary elections for turnout in selecting the presidential party nominees. Drawing from a micro-level theory of participation in sequential elections, we develop a set of aggregate-level hypotheses that tease out different ways that candidate mobilization efforts as well as the legal and institutional structures within a sequential contest influence turnout in presidential nomination contests. Using data from all state primary elections from 1972–2016, we find that electorates facing winnowed candidate pools, and those with contests after the effective endings to presidential contests have substantially reduced turnout that effectively disenfranchises voters in many states. Sequenced primary elections lead to lower overall turnout and less meaningful participation for many voters during presidential nominations contests.

Definitely Not Moralistic: State Political Culture and Support for Donald Trump in the Race for the 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination

ABSTRACTThis study analyzes the important role state political culture played in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Donald Trump appealed to demographically distinct types of voters in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries and caucuses that varied considerably from previous Republican presidential nominees. Relative to the demographics of the primary electorates, however, this study finds that state political culture played an outsized role in determining Donald Trump’s relative level of support in a particular state. When state demographics are utilized in ordinary least squares regression models as independent variables with state partisanship and Daniel Elazar’s state political culture typology, political culture proves to be a significant determinant of the level of support given to Trump in a state. States that are characterized by a more moralistic political culture are considerably more likely to have given Trump a lower share of the vote while voters in states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic or individualistic culture were more likely to support Trump.

Party-Feeling: Richard Whately and the 2016 United States Election

The partisanship of contemporary United States politics, whether in the form of legislative gridlock or the venomous rhetoric of the 2016 United States presidential primaries, would not have surpri...