Voter Contact Research Articles

Factors Affecting the Participating Intention in Online Voter Contact: A Case Study of Long An Province

The aim of this study is to investigate the factors influencing online voter contact intention in Long An province, based on merging the TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) and TPB (Theory of Planned Behavior) frameworks. Analysis conducted using PLS-SEM with a sample size of 201 participants reveals that perceived usefulness is the most significant predictor of participants’ attitudes. The constructs of TPB, including attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control, exhibit positive and statistically significant effects on the intention to participate in online voter contact. The findings of this study have several implications for agencies involved in promoting policies related to online voter contact.

Doorknocks and dog bandanas: a new conception of field campaigning activities

ABSTRACT Despite pundit claims that field campaigns contributed to the Australian Greens Party and independent candidates’ successes in the 2022 federal election, little is known about the activities conducted. The use and development of novel activities has been established, but what happens on the ground remains largely invisible. Comparing the results of semistructured interviews with participants from across the Australian Greens Party and the ‘teal’ independents (N = 73), this article develops a new understanding of the activities of field campaigning and illuminates the differences between independent and party campaigns. The Greens are shown to focus more on traditional voter contact activities, while the independent campaigns prioritise visibility and volunteer participation. From these results, this study establishes a new definition of field campaigning and clarifies the way in which institutional knowledge, or the lack thereof, shapes the conception and development of campaign activities.

The role of political marketing and its importance in Barisan Nasional at Malaysia general election

This study discusses the political marketing tools based on the research in Barisan Nasional (BN) at Malaysia general election. According to the Malaysian law, the date of the last election and subsequent election is to be held at 5-year intervals. Thus, after GE12 in 2008, GE13 was held in 2013. Since 1969 from Alliance coalition to 1973 BN coalition never lost a general election in parliamentary constituency. The political tsunami in GE12 BN won 140 seats in Dewan Rakyat out of 222 seats, opposition parties such as Pakatan Rakyat (PR) won 82 seats out of 222 Dewan Rakyat of seats in Malaysia (Election Commission of Malaysia, 2008, 2013, 2018). The GE13 result was almost the same as GE12 in which BN won 133 seats in Dewan Rakyat or 47.38% of the votes. Pakatan Rakyat (PR) won the support for 89 seats in Dewan Rakyat or 50.87% of the votes. This is first time BN won in the general election but with less of the votes. In GE12 and GE13 voters started to support the opposition rather than BN. Specifically, direct voter contact, indirect voter contact, dominant party, party leader, gerrymandering, malapportionment, re-delineation, first-past-the-post system (FPTP) are the political marketing tools implement by BN. This paper discusses about political marketing tools employed by BN during general election. Therefore, this paper can provide information to political parties and help them to identify the suitable political marketing tools for coming elections.

Voter Privacy and Big-Data Elections

Big data and analytics have changed politics, with serious implications for the protection of personal privacy and for democracy. Political parties now hold large amounts of personal information about the individuals from whom they seek political contributions and, at election time, votes. This voter data is used for a variety of purposes, including voter contact and turnout, fundraising, honing of political messaging, and microtargeted communications designed specifically to appeal to small subsets of voters. Yet both privacy laws and election laws in Canada have failed to keep up with these developments in political campaigning and are in need of reform to protect voter privacy. We provide an overview of big data campaign practices, analyze the gaps in Canadian federal privacy and election law that enable such practices, and offer recommendations to amend federal laws to address the threats to voter privacy posed by big data election campaigns.

Campaign Dynamics of the Top-Two Primary: Invoking Competition and Representational Pressure in one-party Contests

ABSTRACTWhen top-two primaries produce general election contests between two candidates of the same party, those candidates can no longer rely on party-based voting to win. By changing the mix of opponents that candidates face, the top-two primary broadens the electorate to which candidates are pressured to respond. In this paper, I investigate how same-party contests influence candidates’ campaign strategies and representational efforts by interviewing state legislative candidates in Washington and North Carolina. I focus on candidates in lopsided districts that favour one party, but those in Washington faced opponents from within their own party. Two key findings emerge from these interviews. First, candidates in one-party contests broaden the ideological range of voters and interest groups to whom they appeal. Second, candidates in one-party contests adopt vigorous campaign strategies, including voter contact efforts, that one would expect in a highly-competitive contest – even when the contest is not competitive. Ultimately, findings improve our understanding of the consequences of electoral rules for representation.

Polls and Elections: Abandoning the Ground Game? Field Organization in the 2016 Election

I examine the organizational and voter contact strategies of the presidential campaigns in the 2016 election, finding that Hillary Clinton opened many more field offices than Donald Trump. Both Clinton and Trump invested less aggressively in field operations than their predecessors while avoiding areas of opponent strength and “swing” areas. Neither Clinton nor Trump held a clear advantage in voter contact, and estimates of the effects of field offices were smaller than in previous cycles. Clinton's defeat should not be interpreted as evidence that field organizing is a poor investment in 2020.

Instrumental Variable Methods for Conditional Effects and Causal Interaction in Voter Mobilization Experiments

ABSTRACTIn democratic countries, voting is one of the most important ways for citizens to influence policy and hold their representatives accountable. And yet, in the United States and many other countries, rates of voter turnout are alarmingly low. Every election cycle, mobilization efforts encourage citizens to vote and ensure that elections reflect the true will of the people. To establish the most effective way of encouraging voter turnout, this article seeks to differentiate between (1) the synergy hypothesis that multiple instances of voter contact increase the effectiveness of a single form of contact, and (2) the diminishing returns hypothesis that multiple instances of contact are less effective or even counterproductive. Remarkably, previous studies have been unable to compare these hypotheses because extant approaches to analyzing experiments with noncompliance cannot speak to questions of causal interaction. I resolve this impasse by extending the traditional instrumental variables framework to accommodate multiple treatment–instrument pairs, which allows for the estimation of conditional and interaction effects to adjudicate between synergy and diminishing returns. The analysis of two voter mobilization field experiments provides the first evidence of diminishing returns to follow-up contact and a cautionary tale about experimental design for these quantities. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Parties are No Civic Charities: Voter Contact and the Changing Partisan Composition of the Electorate

In contrast to non-partisan Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaigns, political parties do not aim to increase turnout across the board. Instead, their principal goal is to affect the outcome of an election in their favor. To find out how they realize this aim, we carried out a randomized field experiment to evaluate the effect of campaign visits and leafleting by Conservative Party canvassers on turnout in a marginal English Parliamentary constituency during the 2014 European and Local Elections. Commonly-used campaign interventions, leaflets and door-knocks, changed the composition of the electorate in favor of the Conservative Party, but did not increase turnout overall. Supporters of rival parties, particularly Labour self-identifiers, were significantly less likely to mobilize in response to Conservative campaign contact than Conservative supporters. In contrast to the non-partisan GOTV literature, we show that impersonal campaign leaflets were as effective in shaping the local electorate in the Conservative’s favor as personal visits. The common practice of contacting all constituents irrespective of their party preferences was effective as a campaign tactic, but had no civic benefits in the aggregate.

Voter mobilisation in context

This special issue arose from a collaboration between researchers at the University of Manchester and Duke University that was funded by the Economic Social and Research Council [ES/J019453/1]. The project sought to examine the nature of voter contact in the digital age in comparative context. In particular we were interested to understand the extent to which parties and candidates were seeking to mobilise voters during national election campaigns in the US and UK using new communication channels such as email, sms/text messages, and social media. After benchmarking the use of these tactics in national campaigns we also wanted to address the 64 million dollar question of whether these methods actually worked. Does online contact actually increase the likelihood that someone will turn out to vote? And if so, how effective is it in comparison with other more conventional methods? Our interest in researching these questions was triggered by the general growth in use of these tools across both countries and particularly the high profile e-campaign of Barack Obama to reach the White House in 2008. In the course of conducting our research on the effects of new forms of voter contact we faced some immediate questions about the extent to which internet-based methods can be meaningfully compared with more traditional offline modes. Given the rapid proliferation in the types of online communication channels now available, how far can a simple binary division into online and offline channels really capture this new complexity? How do we take account of the increasingly complex and indirect web of connections through which parties’ online messages can be conveyed and also the extent to which parties themselves can control this? While email is perhaps the closest approximation to the more conventional ‘surgical’ methods that parties use such as direct mail and phone calls, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are more than simply conduits for content but are themselves immersive new social spaces. The idea of the internet and particularly social media serving as a new context for mobilisation prompted us to think more generally about how far the field had moved and broadened both substantively and methodologically since the seminal work of Rosenstone and Hansen in the early 1990s. What new forces now impinge on voter contacting and how far do the old channels remain potent? In particular, how have advances in technology affected parties’ strategies and improved their capacity to target voters? What are some of the ‘new’ contextual factors that we might need to consider, particularly beyond expressly political and institutional channels? And finally what new methods are available to best capture this wider complexity of affective forces? To explore these questions we invited leading scholars within the field to reflect on the current and past state of voter mobilisation research as well as to provide us with some fresh empirical evidence about the relevance of context in shaping parties’ GOTV efforts. The papers gathered here represent the fruits of that effort and provide a rich insight into and update on the impact of a variety of technological, social, economic and political influences on parties’ GOTV efforts.

Presence to Press: How Campaigns EarnLocal Media

Today’s campaigns have ample resources with which to influence the media, while plummeting revenue, readership, and reporting staffs make local newspapers more vulnerable than ever. This imbalance raises an important question: if a campaign invests more resources in an area, can it earn positive media coverage? In this article, I propose a strategic relationship between campaigns and local media. Newspapers offer campaigns credibility and exposure, while campaigns offer local newspapers easy-to-report stories that will appeal to their readers. Campaign messages are more impactful when communicated through the local press, so campaigns will try to influence local news coverage (when they have the resources to do so) by establishing a local presence. When newspapers are vulnerable, they should be more likely to accept campaign prompting and provide campaigns with positive earned media. I employ an original data set of newspaper content and campaign investment from the 2004 and 2008 elections. I utilize a within-state matched-pairs design of newspapers from the state of Florida and a detailed content analysis of stories from 21 randomly selected days from each election cycle. I find that regional campaign presence generates positive earned media, but only in smaller newspapers. This article contributes to the fields of campaign and media effects by demonstrating how campaigns’ calculated decisions influence the construction of local political news. It is the first study to describe the connection between the voter contact and campaigns’ earned local media strategy.

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.

The Paradoxes of Parliament–Citizen Connections in Hungary: A Window on the Political System

The main argument of this article is that parliament–citizen connections in Hungary have been conditioned by broad political systemic features between 1990 and 2010. After a brief review of the institutional choices that lead to the current parliamentary set-up, the connections between representatives and the represented are mapped out by examining the level of trust in the legislature, the focus of representation, types of MP–voter contact and diverse constituency-related activities. Further, direct democracy opportunities and the role of new communication techniques are investigated before and during the 2010 election campaign. The findings confirm some paradoxes: although MPs' activity towards citizens has increased, citizens do not connect with MPs to any greater degree; or when direct democracy instruments reach out towards parliament, parties can be found in the background. All in all, parliament's role has diminished with vague representation and accountability patterns.

Grassroots Mobilization in the 2008 Presidential Election

Previous research suggests that political parties have been especially active in personally contacting potential voters in recent presidential elections. Using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) from 1956 through 2008, this study builds on the extant literature by examining major party contact during the 2008 election cycle. We also investigate the major parties' targeting strategies and the overall impact of party contact on voter turnout. We find that overall voter contact rates remained on par with 2004; in absolute terms, however, an unprecedented number of Americans report being contacted by a major party in 2008. Democrats were significantly more active than Republicans in 2008. For the most part, the parties pursued support from similar coalitions of voters as in 2004, although some groups were targeted more aggressively by each party in 2008, especially in competitive states. The results show further that mobilization efforts in 2008 accounted for boosting national turnout by 14.5 million votes.

Tempus Fugit

SUMMARY This study examines campaign schedules from a sample of congressional and legislative candidates in Texas in the November 2002 general election. The schedules show that candidates focus most of their time on voter contact activities, followed by political activities. Despite expectations, fund raising is not the most common activity on campaigns. The data further demonstrate that congressional candidates spend much more time on the campaign trail than state legislative candidates, and a great deal more time raising money. Also, candidates in rural districts spend a greater proportion of their time on political activities, while urban and suburban candidates focus more attention on fund raising. The structure of these different types of districts seems to provide campaigns with different avenues of most efficiently contacting voters.

Political Mobilization in the Pews: Religious Contacting and Electoral Turnout

Objective. We probe the impact of voter contact by religious groups, in the form of direct attempts to encourage voters to vote in a certain way and the placement of voter guides in churches, on voter turnout among white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, white Roman Catholics, and black Protestants in 1994, 1996, and 1998. Methods. Using data from the 1994, 1996, and 1998 National Election Studies, we fit a series of logistic regression models of voter turnout that feature, as key predictors, variables indicating whether an individual was contacted by “any groups concerned with moral or religious issues that tried to encourage you to vote in a particular way” and whether “information about candidates, parties or political issues [was] made available in your place of worship before the election.”Results. These forms of contact were most commonly experienced by white evangelicals and black Protestants, and in many instances such contacts accomplished their intended purpose. Conclusions. Interest group contacts—at least contacts from the types of groups examined here—have the potential to be no more effective than contacts by political parties, perhaps because their messages can be more narrowly targeted.

The Geometry of a Parameter Space of Interacting Particle Systems

We study a four-parameter family of interacting particle systems containing the basic voter model and contact processes. Two processes in this family are related by duality or thinning if and only if their parameters belong to the same orbit of a certain one-dimensional group of linear mappings. This shows that many duals exist.

Voter Contact Techniques in State Legislative Campaigns: The Prevalence of Mass Media Advertising

What methods of voter contact are used by candidates running for state legislative office? A number of studies on the congressional level suggest that mass media advertising, particularly on television, is becoming the predominant form of voter contact. However, few studies have questioned whether these findings are generalizable to state legislative races. This analysis of itemized expenditure data for 583 primary and general election candidates in Texas and Kansas shows that state legislative campaigns differ dramatically from congressional campaigns in their methods of voter contact. In both primary and general election campaigns, state legislative candidates allocate a preponderance of their voter contact dollars to direct forms of contact, such as mailings and pamphlet distribution. However, some candidates do allocate resources to advertising in mass media. District-level features condition the choice more than do candidate type, level of expenditures, or electoral competition. Few recent studies have examined voter contact expenditures in state legislative campaigns in detail. Using spending data from campaigns in Texas and Kansas, this study addresses two types of question. First, how do state legislative candidates allocate their resources-what types of media do they rely on to deliver their message to voters? Do they spend higher proportions of their voter contact dollars on mass media or on more direct forms of contact, such as mailings and pamphlet distribution? Second, what factors influence these choices? I explore a number of explanations for spending patterns, including those related to the candidate, the campaign context, and the legislative district.

Up Close and Personal: Campaign Contact and Candidate Spending in U.S. House Elections

Very little evidence exists on which forms of voter contact have the greatest impact on election outcomes. In this article we attempt to assess systemati cally the effect of different forms of voter contact on congressional vote choice. By estimating a system of equations for spending and vote choice with three different forms of personal and media contact we are able to investigate how different forms of contact directly affect the vote choice as well as mediate the impact of candidate spending. We find that incum bents and challengers benefit differently from the different forms of con tact. Challengers tend to get a bigger direct effect from contact in general probably because as a group they are less well known than incumbents. Incumbents, on the other hand, seem able to use contact through the me dia to maintain their advantage. Contact through television enhances the effect of spending to a much greater extent than is true for challengers, suggesting that incumbents who reach a large percentage of the electorate are difficult to beat.

Recent Research on “Incumbency Advantage” in House Elections: Part II

Research before 1978 on elections for U.S. Representative persistently raised the question of just what factors yield the advantage incumbents enjoy (Beth, 1982; Goldenberg and Traugott, 1980: 62; Fiorina, 1982: 35-38; Hinckley, 1980a: 645-646). To illuminate this question, the 1978 national election survey by Michigan's Center for Political Studies, taking the congressional district as the primary sampling unit, included extensive questions on voter contact with awareness of, and evaluation of, House candidates (Mann and Wolfinger, 1980: 133). A side effect of this design was uneven coverage of Senate races; it also happened that incumbents ran more strongly in sampled races than overall, and among respondents than in the electorate (Mann and Wolfinger: 133-136; Jacobson, 1981a: 240-242; 1981b: 185; Fiorina, 1982: 42). This essay surveys recent articles on the subject, especially those using this data.

Political Parties and Political Participation: A Reexamination of the Standard Socioeconomic Model

This paper examines conventional explanations as to why many lower status persons in the United States are less inclined than others to participate in politics. Such explanations typically treat lower status nonparticipation as the result of SES-related personality traits and therefore as an inevitable consequence of stratification. We present two lines of analysis. First, a review of comparative data suggests that such explanations ignore characteristics of U.S. political institutions—especially the programs and recruitment strategies employed by the major political parties—which are important sources of lower status political disinterest and nonparticipation. Second, in contrast to previous studies, we examine the effects of political party recruitment patterns on voting and campaign activity. Using the 1976 CPS election study, we find that: (1) voter contact by a political party or candidate increases the likelihood of voting and campaign activity, although it made no difference which party made the overture; (2) voter contact by the two major parties did not reduce the greater likelihood that high SES citizens would participate more in politics; and (3) the impact of contact was the same across social status and political party lines. The implications of these findings for theory and research on social class and political participation are discussed in the text.