US Senate Elections Research Articles

US Senate campaigns, negative advertising, and voter mobilization in the 1998 midterm election

The most prominent theories of electoral participation focus on the individual-level characteristics of citizens as the primary determinants of voter turnout. However, seeking to re-incorporate “politics” into the study of electoral participation, scholars have increasingly turned their attention toward the stimulus provided by political campaigns. A major point of emphasis within this research has been whether negative campaigns mobilize or demobilize citizens. Findings thus far have been mixed. We further this line of inquiry by conducting a broad-based study of the impact of state-level campaigns on individual voter turnout. Merging media market-level measures of television campaign advertising in US Senate elections with individual-level data from the 1998 National Election Study and the Voter Supplement File of the November 1998 Current Population Survey, we find strong support for a mobilization effect. We further demonstrate that the mobilization effect of these advertising campaigns results almost entirely from the volume of negative ads aired. Our results help to clarify the role of campaigns in general, and negative campaigning in particular, in bringing voters to the polls.

Party Activists, Campaign Resources and Candidate Position Taking: Theory, Tests and Applications

Electoral competition is here specified as revolving around both candidate policy positions and non-policy issues.Two candidates spend their resources on non-policy issues to sway citizens' ideological voting decisions but they are constrained by their party activists who provide them with electoral resources. In this setting, a candidate with a resource advantage converges more towards the centre, but a candidate with a resource disadvantage diverges more from the centre. This asymmetry in two candidates' incentives to converge generates the result that the two candidates do not converge towards each other. To test these theoretical results, two-stage estimation is used in this article to solve the reciprocal relationship between policy moderation and campaign resources. This analysis produces strong empirical support for the model in the context of US Senate elections between 1974 and 2000.

Negative Campaigning by US Senate Candidates

This article examines the use of negative campaigning in US Senate election campaigns from 1988 to 1998. We explore the relationship of negativism to candidate characteristics, campaign activities and the political context of these elections by testing seven hypotheses about candidates' use of negative campaigning. Our results suggest that such practices are disproportionately employed by candidates with relatively few campaign resources, by challengers, by Republicans, by candidates in open seat races, and by candidates whose opponents `go negative'. Indeed, we estimate almost a one-for-one feedback of the opponent's negativism on the negativism of Senate candidate's own campaigns - which, borrowing from the international relations field, we refer to as Mutually Assured Detraction, or MAD. The article concludes with a discussion of the possible impact and desirability of negative campaigning in American elections, and speculation on the implications for politics in other democracies.

Level-of-Analysis Effects on Explanations of Voting: The Case of the 1982 US Senate Elections

The availability of rich survey data, and concerns over the ecological fallacy, have led voting researchers to focus on the explanation of individual voting decisions at the expense of accounting for patterns of aggregate election outcomes. This has skewed our understanding of the relative importance of various factors in the electoral process. A framework for analysis of elections at multiple levels is developed and applied using data from twenty-three exit polls from the US Senate elections. Comparable parameters for a simple voting model are estimated for individual voting and for election outcomes. Election-level factors, especially candidates' issue strategies and incumbency, are substantially more important in accounting for election outcomes than in explaining individual voting decisions. Finally, working with election outcomes permits an estimate of a path model of Senate election outcomes that shows key relationships that are not accessible from individual level data.

British journal of political science: John R. Hibbing and John R. Alford, ‘Economic Conditions and the Forgotten Side of Congress: A Foray into US Senate Elections’, 12:4, October 1982, pp. 505–513

British journal of political science: John R. Hibbing and John R. Alford, ‘Economic Conditions and the Forgotten Side of Congress: A Foray into US Senate Elections’, 12:4, October 1982, pp. 505–513

Economic Conditions and the Forgotten Side of Congress: A Foray into US Senate Elections

The 1980 American national elections produced two highly salient and widely-discussed departures from past tradition. For the first time in forty-eight years, a previously elected incumbent president seeking re-election was defeated. At the same time the Republicans, the traditional minority party, seized control of the upper house. Both events figured heavily in discussions of the American electorate's supposed turn to the right. Much of this emphasis on ideological change may be misplaced. A third, although much less noted, departure from tradition also occurred in 1980: for the first time since 1932, real disposable per capita income declined in the year preceding a presidential election. The importance of such a decline for the electoral fate of an incumbent president has been well documented. Numerous previous studies have indicated a powerful and consistent impact of changes in economic conditions on voting behaviour in presidential elections. The influence of economic conditions on the fate of the president's party in House elections is also well-documented. In the case of Senate elections, however, the literature is curiously silent.