Primary Campaigns Research Articles

Experiential Learning in the “First in the Nation” Primary State: Efficacy and Impact of a Political Science Educational Experience

In January 2016 and 2020, political science faculty and students traveled to New Hampshire for the run-up to the state’s “first in the nation” presidential primaries. For ten days, students met with presidential primary candidates, and discussed the context and content of the election with state officials, campaign operatives, and media professionals. These first-hand experiences, accompanied by faculty lectures and class discussions, helped students gain a better understanding of presidential primary campaigns as part of an experiential learning course on political campaigns and communication. Utilizing Kolb’s experiential learning theory, our work explores how students were impacted by the unique experiential learning experience. Specifically, we hypothesize that this course can lead students to become better citizens who think and act in ways that are normatively desirable in a democracy. Data supports our hypotheses; when compared to students not enrolled in an experiential learning version of the course, our experiential learning subjects were more likely to be politically engaged, to have trust in individual politicians, to be more efficacious about citizens’ ability to impact politics, and to be more politically ambitious.

Will She Win? Gendered Media Coverage of the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Primaries

In the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary campaigns, six women, the most in history, announced their candidacy for the presidency. Using computational topic modeling and network analysis of 84,000 newspaper articles (2.2 million paragraphs), we analyze how gender and electability was discussed during the Primaries. Results reveal that male candidates, and especially Joe Biden, were frequently compared with the incumbent, Donald Trump, while coverage of female candidates focused directly on social policy. Trump’s attack on Biden during the impeachment process produced a lasting effect by promoting discourse topics traditionally dominated by men. This crowded out the topics emphasized by women, such as health care and education. Women candidates’ press coverage was also more reactionary than men’s. Although explicit reference to gender as a discourse topic has decreased, which suggests growing gender parity within the political process, gendered policy salience emerges transitively in comparison with the incumbent. Transitive policy salience emerges as a key explanatory variable that articulates the indirect path media coverage can lead to the marginalization of women candidates.

United States politicians’ tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous trends. To date, data-driven evidence regarding these questions is scarce, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining a comprehensive, longitudinal record of politicians’ utterances. Here we apply psycholinguistic tools to a novel, comprehensive corpus of 24 million quotes from online news attributed to 18,627 US politicians in order to analyze how the tone of US politicians’ language as reported in online media evolved between 2008 and 2020. We show that, whereas the frequency of negative emotion words had decreased continuously during Obama’s tenure, it suddenly and lastingly increased with the 2016 primary campaigns, by 1.6 pre-campaign standard deviations, or 8% of the pre-campaign mean, in a pattern that emerges across parties. The effect size drops by 40% when omitting Trump’s quotes, and by 50% when averaging over speakers rather than quotes, implying that prominent speakers, and Trump in particular, have disproportionately, though not exclusively, contributed to the rise in negative language. This work provides the first large-scale data-driven evidence of a drastic shift toward a more negative political tone following Trump’s campaign start as a catalyst. The findings have important implications for the debate about the state of US politics.

Mapping moral language on US presidential primary campaigns reveals rhetorical networks of political division and unity.

During political campaigns, candidates use rhetoric to advance competing visions and assessments of their country. Research reveals that the moral language used in this rhetoric can significantly influence citizens' political attitudes and behaviors; however, the moral language actually used in the rhetoric of elites during political campaigns remains understudied. Using a data set of every tweet () published by 39 US presidential candidates during the 2016 and 2020 primary elections, we extracted moral language and constructed network models illustrating how candidates' rhetoric is semantically connected. These network models yielded two key discoveries. First, we find that party affiliation clusters can be reconstructed solely based on the moral words used in candidates' rhetoric. Within each party, popular moral values are expressed in highly similar ways, with Democrats emphasizing careful and just treatment of individuals and Republicans emphasizing in-group loyalty and respect for social hierarchies. Second, we illustrate the ways in which outsider candidates like Donald Trump can separate themselves during primaries by using moral rhetoric that differs from their parties' common language. Our findings demonstrate the functional use of strategic moral rhetoric in a campaign context and show that unique methods of text network analysis are broadly applicable to the study of campaigns and social movements.

Growing violence: the image of the boy in Australian domestic violence prevention campaigns

ABSTRACT This paper explores the discursive construction of boys in two Australia domestic violence primary prevention advertisement campaigns. The first, ‘Stop it at the Start’, is an Australian government initiative which launched in 2016 and includes five different video shorts. The second is the Victorian Government’s 2016 ‘Respect Women. For Our Children’s Future’ campaign, which includes two video advertisements: ‘Nothing Good about Dads Who Abuse Women’ and ‘Family Violence Has No Good Days’. We explore the tendency of these campaigns to construct boys as future perpetrators; their representation of boys’ unambiguous and painless inculcation into masculine violence; their lack of attention to the psychological effects of boys’ experiences of witnessing domestic violence; how the ‘future’ framing of the advertisement diverts attention away from violence done to women in the present; and, their failure to represent feminist education for boys. By examining these limitations, we draw attention to the places where an affirmative feminist studies of boys is needed in order to address the realities and needs of boys in the present.

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and the question of populism

ABSTRACT Vying for the presidential nomination from the two major U.S. parties in 2016, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were repeatedly called ‘populists’ – even though their political positions and policy proposals on key issues differed very sharply throughout their campaigns. This article looks into the question of why the ‘populist’ label was applied to two politicians so fundamentally opposed, and what this means for the broader debate on populism. In doing so, it presents a discursive model for the empirical study of populism applicable independently of substantive ideological commitments and used to analyse key textual output from Trump’s and Sanders’s primary campaigns. The article concludes that, although both actors’ political discourses feature different elements of populism to varying degrees, Sanders more discernibly articulates the people-outgroup antagonism that constitutes the very fundament of populism. Yet Trump much more clearly employs elements of discourse that indicate a conflict with democratic pluralism. This finding demonstrates how features of populism can indeed be applied to very different political positions, and it calls into question the common notion that populism is generically aimed at undermining liberal democracy.

The Coup de Grâce to the Sanders Campaign: Michigan, Momentum & Viability.

We illuminate the dynamics of primary campaigns by looking at how individuals changed their candidate support, favorability and viability within a crucial state in the 2020 primary. Via a multi-wave survey of likely primary voters in Michigan, we show that Joe Biden’s comeback win was due primarily to the change in perception of his viability following South Carolina and Super Tuesday, especially among the more moderate portion of the Democratic electorate. In subsequent county-level analyses we find that the difference between Bernie Sanders’s win in 2016 and loss in 2020 was more a function of changes in the Democratic primary electorate than in his appeal. Our work suggests that gains in viability do not benefit all candidates equally. Moreover, viability can be generated later in the schedule than previously thought and to decisive ends. We consider the implications of our findings for understanding Michigan’s outcome in November.

Positive and negative campaigning in primary and general elections

We analyze primary and general election campaigning. Positive campaigning builds a candidate's reputation; negative campaigning damages a rival's. Each primary candidate hopes to win the general election; but failing that, he wants his primary rival to win. We establish that general elections always feature more negative campaigning than positive, as long as reputations are easier to tear down than build up. In contrast, if the effects of primary campaigns strongly persist, primary elections always feature more positive campaigning than negative. This reflects that a primary winner benefits only from his positive primary campaigning in general elections, and negative campaigning by a rival hurts.

The Influence of Technology on Presidential Primary Campaigns

There is no doubt that the American people object to the high cost of election campaigns. For example, a 2018 Pew poll found that 77 percent of Americans would support laws to restrict the total amount of campaign spending. Support for spending caps crosses partisan lines. The idea of legal restraints on campaign spending receives the support of 85 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans. Many blame the high cost of American elections on the Supreme Court's decisions in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which deregulated aspects of federal campaign finance law. Ultimately, however, the origins of skyrocketing campaign costs long predate Buckley and Citizens United. More than any other single factor, innovations in communication technology have shaped presidential campaign spending since 1912. First radio, then television, and more recently the internet emerged as indispensable means of political communication. But the technological innovations have come with a high price for candidates and campaigns, driving costs relentlessly higher. This chapter examines how technology has shaped the presidential nomination process, making the pursuit of the White House an ever more expensive proposition. This work is a chapter in a forthcoming 2020 book entitled The Best Candidate: Presidential Nomination in Polarized Times.

Cutaneous melanoma—The benefit of screening and preventive measures

The incidence rates of cutaneous melanoma are continually rising in the Caucasian population with the highest rates in Australia and New Zealand. The genesis of melanoma is a complex interplay between genetic predisposition and exogenous factors. The major known exogenous risk factor of this potentially lethal malignancy is ultraviolet (UV) radiation. In the last decades diverse prevention strategies have been developed which in case of primary prevention are aimed to protect the skin from high-dose UV radiation. Although its effect is only visible after a long period of time and despite the growing awareness in the general population, it seems that primary prevention interventions are often not carried out as recommended. It was proposed that particularly in Europe where incidence rates are still increasing, the development and implementation of primary prevention campaigns should be pursued further. Secondary prevention implies early detection of melanoma by using skin cancer screenings. However, according to recent reviews there is only limited evidence on impact and benefit of routine skin cancer screenings in the adult general population. Thus, it was suggested that future research should focus on effects of targeted screening in population subgroups with increased risk for melanoma.

Etch-a-Sketching: Evaluating the Post-Primary Rhetorical Moderation Hypothesis

Candidates have incentives to present themselves as strong partisans in primary elections, and then move “toward the center” upon advancing to the general election. Yet, candidates also face incentives not to flip-flop on their policy positions. These competing incentives suggest that candidates might use rhetoric to seem more partisan in the primary and more moderate in the general, even if their policy positions remain fixed. We test this idea by measuring ideological moderation in presidential campaign language. Using a supervised two-stage text analysis model, we find evidence that presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012 use more ideologically extreme language during primary campaigns, and then moderate their tone when shifting to the general election, with troubling implications for representation and accountability.

The Impact of the Internet 2.0 on the Voting Behaviour in the United States of America – the Analysis of the 2016 Presidential Primaries

The aim of the article is to study, whether the voting behaviour of the electorate in the US can be heavily influenced by the use of social media during the political campaign. It also focuses on the celebrity endorsement, which is becoming one of the most important parts of the campaigning process in the United States. The article analyses the presidential primary campaigns of four most popular politicians who took part in the 2016 elections.

Partisan Dynamics in Presidential Primaries and Campaign Divisiveness

Observers have noted that the Republican and Democratic primaries differ substantially, with Republicans typically having an easier time selecting their nominee. Previous research has suggested that this may be attributable to Republican Party homogeneity and delegate allocation rules that winnow candidates faster, but there is little empirical evidence on how these factors influence the primary process. Rather than predicting overall vote share or the nominee, I examine the temporal dynamics of each party’s primary campaigns. I show that Republican candidates are over-rewarded for winning elections, while Democrats are rewarded for performing well overall. The result is that late in the campaign, Republicans are much more likely to exit as compared with Democrats, and there is little evidence that these dynamics have changed over time. I conclude that the Republican Party produces systematically shorter and less divisive primaries as a result of its faster and more efficient winnowing process.

Communicating Party Labels and Names on Twitter During the 2016 Presidential Invisible Primary and Primary Campaigns

This study investigated the use of party and ideological labels and candidate names in major party candidate tweets (N = 94,310) during the 2016 presidential preprimary and primary campaigns to understand the extent to which candidates focused on intraparty and interparty themes as a part of their marketing strategies. The results show that the candidates and their campaigns did not engage in heavy partisan labeling to cultivate their social media identities. Outsider candidates were not more likely to use party or ideological labels in their tweets than insider candidates were. The candidates focused on self-advocacy in their tweets.

Gold, the Brains Trust, and Roosevelt

In this article I revisit the period leading to the abandonment of the gold standard by the US government in 1933, and I investigate whether there was a preconceived plan to take the country off gold. My conclusion is that in 1932, during the primary and presidential campaigns, neither Roosevelt nor his influential inner circle, a group known as the Brains Trust, had very strong views on gold or the dollar. They did believe in the need to experiment, and tinkering with the currency was a possible area for experimentation, but it was an option with a low priority.

Smoking habits in French farmers: a cross-sectional study

BackgroundFarmers are exposed to multiple air contaminants that may interact with tobacco smoking in the development of respiratory diseases. Farmers are currently considered to smoke less than non-farmers, but precise data in different categories of age and farming activities are lacking.MethodsSmoking habits were studied in a cross-sectional study involving 4105 farmers and 996 non-farming controls aged 40–74 years in 9 French departments between October 2012 and May 2013. Three age groups were defined (40–54, 55–64 and 65-74years). Farmers were divided into four activity groups, namely cattle breeders, livestock farmers working in confined spaces, crop farmers and others. Smoking prevalence was compared between farmers and controls, and odds ratios (ORs) for smoking adjusted for age were calculated.ResultsThe adjusted OR for ever-smoking was lower among farmers than among non-farmers in all age categories, but the ORs for current smoking were similar in farmers and controls. Smoking prevalence varied according to the type of farming activity, and was lower than in non-farming controls only among cattle breeders and confined livestock farmers. In farmers, the proportion of smokers was higher in the youngest age categories compared with the older age classes.ConclusionsOur results confirm that the prevalence of ever-smokers is lower in farmers than in non-farmers. Nevertheless, our data show that active smoking prevalence is similar in farmers and in non-farmers. This suggests that farmers, just like non-farmers, should be targeted by primary prevention campaigns against smoking.

Campaign Finance and Primary Elections

We review the literature on the financing of primary election campaigns and provide initial data on contribution trends and donor characteristics in House primaries.

Primaries, patronage, and political personalities in South-western Uganda

ABSTRACTThis paper is an ethnographic study of the National Resistance Movement Party primaries that took place in the constituency of Rwampara County, Mbarara District, between mid and late 2015. Based on fieldwork carried out during the primary campaigns, it offers a detailed examination of the five candidates’ campaign strategies in the run-up to the polls. It focuses in particular upon the ways in which they all sought to secure votes through making frequent public donations to potential voters. Building upon recent insights from a nascent anthropology of corruption, the paper argues that it is crucial to understand how these gifts were conceptualized, both by their givers and their recipients. It finds that although these donations generally made sense to everyone involved in terms of long-standing cultural logics regarding the ‘proper’ operations of power (amaani), this is not to say that they simply reflected cultural continuities. On the contrary, over the course of the campaigns, both the practices of gifting, and the meanings that attached to these, changed significantly. This helps to explain how and why, in the context of all of this gifting, the donations of one candidate – and one candidate only – came to be seen as illegitimate (i.e. as ‘corrupt’).

Donald Trump and the 'Oxygen of Publicity': Branding, Social Media, and Mass Media in the 2016 Presidential Primary Elections

Can political communication specialists benefit from developments in social media intelligence in the business sphere? The corporate world and management studies academics have focused a significant amount of attention on translating online data into actionable intelligence about consumer behavior. At the same time, political scientists are increasingly using online data to test and refine a range of theories, particularly relating to public opinion and voting behavior. This paper, which reports on a joint management/political communication seed grant project from the ADVANCE program at the University of Maryland, explores the extent to which each field can usefully inform the other. We used the early primary campaigns for the U.S. 2016 presidential elections as a case study, finding that Republicans did not establish brand elements of their campaigns on their own websites. We used a broader study of the media ecosystem and brands in election campaigns, finding that traditional media outlets continue to play a large role in amplifying and spreading particular political ‘brand’ elements (e.g. Trump’s immigration stance) in ways that overwhelmed attempts by both seasoned and novice presidential campaigns to attract voter attention in a crowded race. Social media then amplified this brand. Thus, social media intelligence and branding can be a useful part of understanding political brands, but only when this intelligence is deployed within a broader analysis of media ecosystems. We suggest a campaign message flow model for measuring and analyzing how ideas packaged as ‘brands’ can be tracked in a media ecosystem. We also consider the relationship between extremism and media, suggesting that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s conviction that the mass media gave credence to extremism through the “oxygen of publicity” may be the most relevant model for understanding the role of the media in the 2016 U.S presidential elections. Ultimately, our cross-disciplinary approach to social media intelligence holds promise in analyzing how candidate brands/messages are remediated through the legacy media and how these brands/messages resonate among voters.

The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning, 2004–2012

Drawing on theories in organizational sociology that argue that transpositions of people,/ skills, and knowledge across domains give rise to innovations and organizational foundings that institutionalize them, we conducted a mixed-methods study of the employment biographies of staffers working in technology, digital, data, and analytics on American presidential campaigns, and the rates of organizational founding by these staffers, from the 2004 through the 2012 electoral cycles. Using Federal Election Commission and LinkedIn data, we trace the professional biographies of staffers (N = 629) working in technology, digital, data, or analytics on primary and general election presidential campaigns during this period. We found uneven professionalization in these areas, defined in terms of staffers moving from campaign to campaign or from political organizations to campaigns, with high rates of new entrants to the field. Democrats had considerably greater numbers of staffers in the areas of technology, digital, data, and analytics and from the technology industry, and much higher rates of organizational founding. We present qualitative data drawn from interviews with approximately 60 practitioners to explain how the institutional histories of the two parties and their extended networks since 2004 shaped the presidential campaigns during the 2012 cycle and their differential uptake of technology, digital, data, and analytics.