Recent Presidential Campaign Research Articles

The Anthropocene as framed by the far right

The Anthropocene as framed by the far right

Naturalistic Lessons in Post-Inauguration Leadership.

Leadership development opportunities can be derived from naturalistic learning experiences. Six lessons from the recent presidential campaign are presented through a leadership lens rather than a political lens. Topics include networking, polarity management, communication, managing agreement, ambition, and transition management. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2021;52(3):112-114.].

A Digital Field Experiment Reveals Large Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Voter Turnout

Two decades of field experiments on get-out-the-vote tactics suggest that impersonal tactics, like mass emails, have only a modest or negligible effect on voter turnout, while more personal tactics, like door-to-door canvassing, are more effective. However, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to upend the vast face-to-face voter mobilization efforts that have figured prominently in recent presidential election campaigns. If campaigns can no longer send canvassers to voters' doors, what tactics can they turn to in order to mobilize their supporters? This paper evaluates a promising alternative to face-to-face get-out-the-vote tactics: mobile app technology that enables millions of people to message their friends to urge them to vote. Prior to the most recent US midterm elections in 2018, the mobile app Outvote randomized an aspect of their system, hoping to unobtrusively assess the causal effect of their users' messages on voter turnout. We develop a statistical methodology to address the challenges of such data, and then analyze the Outvote study. Our analysis reveals evidence of very large and statistically significant treatment effects from friend-to-friend mobilization efforts ($\widehat{\textrm{CACE}}$= 8.3, $\textrm{CI}$ = (1.2, 15.3)). Further, the statistical methodology can be used to study other friend-to-friend messaging efforts. These results suggest that friend-to-friend texting, which is a personal voter mobilization effort that does not require face-to-face contact, is an effective alternative to conventional voter mobilization tactics.

Educação, nacionalismo, cosmopolitismno: Por uma escola pública cosmopolita

O Brasil testemunhou, em sua recente campanha presidencial, a força do apelo nacionalista, que vem ganhando terreno na cena internacional face à insegurança e à frustração em que as sucessivas crises mergulham as sociedades. Por mais diversas que sejam, na atualidade e na história, as expressões do nacionalismo, desde a Modernidade um ponto comum entre eles é a intenção de fazer da educação e, mais particularmente, da escola pública um instrumento privilegiado de seu proselitismo. Face aos riscos que esse novo retraimento em uma identidade imaginada anuncia, seria a proposta de um cosmopolitismo uma resposta adequada e viável? Esse artigo se propõe a sugerir, sob as bases da crítica dessa escola moderna, a possibilidade de se pensar uma “escola cosmopolita”..

ФЕНОМЕН «СУЧАСНИЙ ПОПУЛІЗМ» У КОНТЕКСТІ РИЗИКІВ І ВИКЛИКІВ ЛІБЕРАЛЬНИХ ДЕМОКРАТІЙ ХХІ СТОЛІТТЯ

In the article attempts of description and analyze of research studies are undertaken, which are recognized in the modern scientific world as «strong points» in the study of the phenomenon of populism, in particular - G. Ionesk, E. Gellner, D. Bell, M. Kenovan, P. Tagart, E. Laclau, I. Me, I. Sorel et other, and the latest Western and domestic theoretical constructs, which lead to the knowledge and the nature and essence of the phenomenon of «modern populism», namely - Z. Bauman, W. Beck, F. Venturi, A. Grimimal-Buss, K. Davyst, J. Judis, R. Itwell, J.-V. Muller, T. Snyder, etc.; T. Andrushchenko, V. Bebyk, S. Datsyuk, I. Kiananka, G. Kuts, O. Lisnichuk, L. Matlai, I. Pobochi, T. Pryadko, T. Rad, O. Yarosha and others. It is determined that the overwhelming majority of modern researchers express a consolidated position on the complexity of definition («populism is the phenomenon dispersed, i.e. it is a component of many political phenomena, embodied in various ideological forms and political strategies») and a huge variety of manifestation of modern populism D. Trump (USA), Brexit (UK), Yellow Vest Movement (France), Five Star Movement (Italy), Podemos (Spain), G. Wilders (Netherlands), V. Orban (Hungary), R. Erdogan (Turkey), etc. Attention is drawn to the fact that the «global success of populists» in the 21st century creates a real threat to liberal-democratic values - individual freedom, pluralism, free speech, free elections, etc. The key factors that provoked «the outburst of populism» are characterized, in particular, the dominance of the contemporary voter in the socio-political moods of feelings of «disappointment», «confusion», «uncertainty» and others. The author attempts to find effective strategies for counteracting «aggressive populism» in the context of the mediation of contemporary political processes, in particular, the formation of critical thinking and media literacy of the modern voter. It is stated that the «wave» of populism also seized the political space of modern Ukraine, in which the mediation of political processes created a new format of communication between voters and politicians, which, in fact, attested to the results of recent presidential and parliamentary election campaigns.

A tale of two parties: comparing the intensity of face threats in the democratic and republican primary debates of 2012 and 2016

ABSTRACTUsing Politeness Theory as the theoretical lens, we explore how Hillary Rodham Clinton overcame a tough primary race against Bernie Sanders while Donald J. Trump emerged unexpectedly from a large field of experienced and highly qualified candidates to win the Republican nomination for president. We examine the degree of aggression and support of candidates’ image in the messages exchanged in the primary debates along the lines of disagreement over character, policy, use of data, and campaign tactics. The results suggest that Republican candidates in their primary debates relied more on aggressive discourse strategies to appeal to partisan voters than Democrats; Democratic candidates were more supportive of one another while debating their differences than Republicans in the primary debates. The trend across two presidential election cycles suggests that primary debates are featuring more aggression, at least for Republicans, and it also appears that voters may be responding favorably to the strategy, at least in the most recent presidential campaign.

What's Behind Declining Male Labor Force Participation: Fewer Good Jobs or Fewer Men Seeking Them?

The recent presidential campaign revived concerns about the state of the American job market. Many observers who are convinced that improving employment indicators mask pervasive hardship cite the increase in the number of prime-age men (those between the ages of 25 and 54) who are neither working nor looking for work; that is, men who are out of the labor force, or inactive. While this upward trend is routinely taken as a sign of the economy’s weakness, other interpretations are possible. This paper attempts to clarify why inactivity in the labor force among prime-age men has grown so steadily for so long. It examines trends in a number of labor market indicators to assess the extent to which rising inactivity rates have reflected a worsening of the job market (lower demand) or reduced job-seeking (lower supply). Finally, it takes a detailed look at four different types of prime-age inactive men — the disabled, the retired, those who want a job, and those who do not. The evidence does not support the view that rising inactivity is the result of a weak labor market. Understanding why prime-age male inactivity has risen requires a focus on disability programs. Public policy should focus on helping the unemployed and inactive men who want jobs — the latter a small share of the inactive — and on reforming disability programs to promote independence. The unemployment rate provides a reliable indicator of changes in the labor market’s strength, even if it understates the level of involuntary joblessness. Policymakers might consider adopting a new “U5b” rate that includes inactive people who want a job with those incorporated in the existing unemployment rate, in order to institutionalize a broader measure of joblessness and increase faith in jobless statistics.

Linking Preference Falsification and Election Fraud in Electoral Autocracies: The Case of Russia

This study sheds new light on whether responses to public opinion polls, namely, preference falsification, can affect the level of election fraud by employing Kuran’s model of preference falsification, which is empirically tested on the data collected from the most recent presidential campaign in Russia (2012). My research findings reveal the presence of a statistically significant effect of preference falsification on election fraud, thus enabling me to conclude that preference falsification is, indeed, conducive to election fraud. My findings can be generalised to a broad set of electoral autocracies, enabling scholars to get a better understanding of the mechanism by which survey polls can incentivise officials to commit election fraud.

Politics in the Consulting Room.

The recent presidential campaign and election have had a strong impact on many patients and clinicians. This guest column and its introduction by Dr Eric Plakun, who edits the psychotherapy section of the journal, note the inevitability that we will all self-disclose, while describing some of the pros and cons and impacts of self-disclosure of a clinician's political perspectives.

Steinbeck Today

Steinbeck Today

Radical Experience and the Surveillance State

Radical Experience and the Surveillance State Elizabeth Faue (bio) Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps. Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 361 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, and index. $24.99. Andrea Friedman. Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $80.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). Jacob Kramer. The New Freedom and the Radicals: Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. 236 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $79.50. William J. Maxwell. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015. 384 pp. Illustrations, notes, works cited, and index. $29.95. Kenyon Zimmer. Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 320 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $95.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). The recent presidential campaign has brought into public debate some of the central political issues of the past century: how democracy and radicalism are defined, how political change originates in and emanates from the marginalized Left, and how the state both constrains and shapes the margins seeking to become mainstream. While the politics of gender and race equality have infiltrated broadcast news and twitter feeds, so too has radicalism—on the left and the right—drawn reporters and crowds. Antiestablishment candidates prosper, as national polls suggest a genuine disenchantment with politics as usual. A socialist garnered significant support in the Democratic Party; white supremacists endorsed the Republican candidate. There is an open and heated debate about who belongs and does not belong in our democracy and who [End Page 136] may be kept out by a wall or denied a voice through voter identification laws. The margins have overtaken the mainstream. Understanding the relationship between radical social movements and change, and between radicals and the existing state apparatus, has long occupied historians of the Left. In these five volumes, we revisit the questions of how radical activism shaped and was shaped by the state and the discourse and practice of citizenship within that state. From covering the arguments and deeds of Italian and Yiddish immigrant radicals and the creation of the national security state under the Wilson administration, to exploring mid-century anticommunism and today’s Black Lives Matter movement, these recent studies show us how responses to radicalism not only transformed the state but also continually redefined freedom and democracy from the political margins. At heart, they offer a collective exploration of how radical ideas and practices have transformed our political culture and the meanings and consequences of that transformation. Kenyon Zimmer’s Immigrants against the State is a case in point. Anarchism in the United States has a bifurcated history. Native-born individualist anarchism dates back to the nineteenth century, when William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau positioned themselves against state-sanctioned slavery. Its heirs today are allied with libertarianism and its pro-capitalist followers. Communist—or collectivist—anarchism, an ideology that veered from authorizing political assassination to pacifist resistance to state-sanctioned violence, has been understood as chiefly European in origin, with its roots in the ideas of Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin. It also has been viewed as an immigrant ideology, not only foreign in origin but also in advocacy. Immigrant communities among Yiddish- and Italian-language speakers gave shelter to anarchists and supported radical political activities, cultural and educational institutions, and newspapers and journals. It is this world that Kenyon Zimmer captures in his account of Progressive Era Yiddish and Italian anarchists. His attention to detail is at times overwhelming, as names, networks, community organizations, and places are stacked like firewood against forgetting. Still, in trying to resurrect an anarchist movement that has been largely ignored and marginalized, the weight of information matters. And while Zimmer treads some familiar ground here—in particular, the work of Michael Miller Topp and Jennifer Guglielmo—his mapping of immigrant anarchism goes beyond these scholars to an account that covers not only the...

Rethinking Geopolitics; Rebuilding Alliances

Although the recent presidential campaign did not focus on foreign policy, the new President will confront major international challenges and be expected both to make difficult decisions about ongoing conflicts and chart a course for the future. This essay sketches the international situation at the end of the Obama Administration and suggests a course of realistic engagement that recognizes the limits of American power in defense of national interests.

A Day at the Office: Political Advocacy and Private Practice

A Day at the Office: Political Advocacy and Private Practice

Party Activists as Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign as a Principal-Agent Problem

As a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show that in the context of the campaign widely considered most adept at direct contact, individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign’s behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters’ priorities. We find little evidence that the campaign was able to use strategies of agent control to mitigate its principal-agent problem. We question whether individuals typically willing to be volunteer surrogates are productive agents for a strategic campaign.

Diversity and its Limits in Electoral Politics: The Case of North Carolina

Since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 as U.S. President, the argument has been that the changing demography of the U.S. population and voters (e.g.-youth, race, gender, ethnicity) will result in successive electoral dominance by the Democratic Party. Despite electoral victories in these states, the Democratic Party and President Obama have lost political ground to the Republican Party in the most recent presidential (2012) and mid-term campaigns (2014) in the state of North Carolina. This paper examines the challenges to political participation by this growing electorate of demographically diverse voters while explaining the expansion of Republican Party in the state of North Carolina. The City of Greensboro, North Carolina serves as a current test of the assumptions that equate diversity with inevitable Democratic Party victory.

Linking Together Preference Falsification and Election Fraud: A Cross-National Analysis

This study sheds new light on whether public opinion polls, namely, preference falsification, can affect the level of election fraud by employing Kuran's model of preference falsification, which is empirically tested on the data collected from the most recent presidential campaign in Russia (2012) as well as a cross-national dataset. My research findings reveal the presence of a statistically significant effect of preference falsification on election frauds, thus enabling me to conclude that preference falsification is, indeed, conducive to election fraud. My findings can be generalized to a broad set of authoritarian regimes, enabling scholars to get a better understanding of the mechanism by which survey polls can incentivize officials to commit election fraud, and this, I hope, will invite more interdisciplinary research in the field of election forensics and survey methodology.

New messages of the Bulgarian political parties and their impact on the electoral preferences of the society

The functioning of a modern democratic state is impossible without observing certain electoral cycles, holding free elections, maintaining carefully thought-out electoral procedures, and sending new messages to voters that affect the formation of public electoral moods. The most important trend in this process is the search for electoral systems that fully take into account the will of citizens and ensure adequate representation of their interests in state bodies. The author proves that during the recent presidential and parliamentary election campaigns that took place in the Republic of Bulgaria, new electoral preferences were quite unexpected for the state. The Bulgarian Parliament quickly shifted to a new paradigm of political rhetoric without changing its structure. “Pro-Euro-Atlantic” parties (the Reformist Bloc, DOST) did not enter the Parliament, and those that are represented in the National Assembly (GERB, BSP, DPS) quite painlessly reoriented to “patriotic” or “state-oriented” messages. The nationalist parties with their new messages that most correspond to the desired new situation, managed to understand the situation in time: they united and were able to get seats in the Government in a new form. They said goodbye to their previous role in Bulgarian politics and became a part of the respectable participants in the political process.

Unifying the Concepts of Electoral Fraud and Preference Falsification: Case of Russia

This study throws new light on whether public opinion polls, namely, preference falsification, can affect the level of election fraud by employing Kuran's model of preference falsification, which is empirically tested using the data collected from the most recent presidential campaign in Russia (2012). My research findings reveal the presence of statistically significant effects of preference falsification on election fraud, thus enabling me to conclude that preference falsification is, indeed, conducive to election fraud. My findings are generalizable to a broad set of authoritarian regimes, enabling scholars to get a better understanding of the mechanism by which survey polls can incentivize officials to commit election fraud. Hopefully, these findings will also invite more interdisciplinary research within the fields of election forensics and survey methodology.

Islam, Depoliticization and the European Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy

A new form of political discourse hostile to Islam has been gaining ground in Europe. Initiated by neo-nationalist parties it appeals to liberal values and is now penetrating mainstream politics. The recent French presidential campaign threw light on the way Centre Right parties vying for government are increasingly instrumentalizing hostility towards Islam to respond to the political crisis triggered by the problem of public debt across the European Union. Critics are approaching this phenomenon through the lens of Foucault's notion of governmentality, questioning the assertion that Muslims cannot integrate in European societies because of their religion and highlighting the failure of European nation states to treat them as citizens and promote their socio-economic inclusion. This perspective yields valuable insights: it shows how the presence of Muslims challenges the belief of European societies in their self-perceived rationality and tolerance, resting on their commitment to secularity as epistemic category. The strident defense of secularism that accompanies Islamophobia is part of the discourse of securitization that characterizes the neo-liberal form of contemporary governmentality and promotes the de-politicization of social problems. The notion of governmentality, however, cannot account fully for the root-cause of Islamophobia: the loss of collective purpose that has triggered a crisis of government and seen the concern for efficient governance to erase the goal of collective self-determination. At heart, Islamophobia constitutes a manifestation of the European states' crisis of democratic legitimacy.

Chavez election victory fails to dispel doubts about future

Venezuela's recent presidential election campaign exposed deep political rifts in a country where President Hugo Chavez had grown accustomed to landslide victories. Although the opposition movement failed to strike a decisive blow to his hold on power in the October vote, nearly half the electorate embraced its narrative of a country in deep trouble. Economic mismanagement by the Chavez administration has brought growing criminal violence, inflation and a lack of food security, leading many to question the wisdom of his leftist ‘chavismo’ movement.