Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Henry E. Brady is Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, and Director of the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Richard Johnston is Professor and Head of Political Science and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.

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Capturing Campaign Effects

The University of Michigan Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................ixThe Study of Political Campaigns Henry E. Brady, Richard Johnston, and John Sides.........................................................1I Voter Decision Making and Campaign EffectsThe Paradox of Minimal Effects Stephen Ansolabehere.......................................................................................29The Impact of Campaigns on Discrepancies, Errors, and Biases in Voting Behavior Patrick Fournier..........................................45Priming and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns Larry M. Bartels.........................................................................78II Research Designs and Statistical Methods for Studying Campaign EffectsCampaigns as Experiments Stephen Ansolabehere.............................................................................................115Three Virtues of Panel Data for the Analysis of Campaign Effects Larry M. Bartels.........................................................134The Rolling Cross-Section and Causal Attribution Henry E. Brady and Richard Johnston......................................................164III Campaign Effects in Congressional and Senatorial Races: Information and IssuesMeasuring Campaign Spending Effects in U.S. House Elections Gary C. Jacobson 199Informational Rhythms of Incumbent-Dominated Congressional Elections Laurel Elms and Paul M. Sniderman....................................221Alternative Tests for the Effects of Campaigns and Candidates on Voting Behavior Benjamin Highton.........................................242IV The Rules of the Game and Election ResultsDo Polls Influence the Vote? Andr Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, and Neil Nevitte............................................................263Strategic Learning in Campaigns with Proportional Representation: Evidence from New Zealand Richard Johnston and JackVowles.....................................................................................................................................280V The Role of the Mass MediaStudying Statewide Political Campaigns R. Michael Alvarez and Alexandra Shankster.........................................................307Gender, Media Coverage, and the Dynamics of Leader Evaluations: The Case of the 1993 Canadian Election ElisabethGidengil and Joanna Everitt................................................................................................................336Mass Media and Third-Party Insurgency Richard Jenkins.....................................................................................356Contributors...............................................................................................................................383Index......................................................................................................................................385

Chapter One

The Paradox of Minimal Effects

Stephen Ansolabehere

Central to the study of campaigns and elections lies a paradox. Voters rely heavily on the information conveyed by campaigns in order to form judgments about who should govern. By most accounts, citizens in modern democracies know little about and feel distant from public affairs. Most people tune in during political campaigns, and what they see and hear can influence their opinions considerably, as shown by recent research on individual voting behavior (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995; Bartels 1993; Jacobson 1990; Johnston et al. 1992; Popkin 1991; Zaller 1992) and on aggregate voting patterns (Bartels 1987; Brady and Johnston 1987; Jacobson 1980, 1990). It should, thus, be hard to anticipate the outcomes of elections without knowing how the media cover the elections, what themes the candidates stress, which candidates advertise the most, and what is said during conventions and debates. Election outcomes are strongly predicted, however, by forces outside of campaign politics. Evidence from an extensive literature on economics and elections shows that the governing party's reelection depends overwhelmingly on whether the country is prosperous at home and at peace abroad. Campaigns seem to be inessential to understanding who wins and who loses.

The 1988 presidential election perhaps best exemplifies this puzzle. To many political scientists the 1988 presidential election represented an analytical triumph. George Bush won with nearly exactly the vote predicted by a simple model in which the vote is predicted by the percentage change in real personal disposable income. The lots of George Bush and Michael Dukakis, it seems, were drawn by the economic fates.

But Bush did not win with ease. Throughout the campaign the polls fluctuated dramatically, suggesting that large fractions of the electorate made up their minds in the months, even days, leading up to Election Day (Gelman and King 1993). Michael Dukakis even held a substantial lead in the polls late in the summer of 1988. Observers of the campaigns argue that Dukakis was brought down not by the sudden realization of many voters that the economy was doing well but by the themes and strategies of the competing campaigns. The Republicans' messages of crime, patriotism, and conservatism resonated well with the public, while the Democratic campaign lost its focus after the primaries. Bush used attack advertisements and the free media with cunning and success, while Dukakis refused to slug back (Germond and Witcover 1989; Jamieson 1992). Such factors are nowhere to be found in the macropolitical models. Even still, those models worked smashingly well, though in the end they looked a lot like voodoo political economics.

How is it that elections are highly predictable when voters rely heavily on what they see and hear in a particular campaign? The obvious, most common, and probably correct response is that the public discourse observed during campaigns confirms what most people privately believe about the state of the country and the political parties and candidates. Beginning with Paul Lazarsfeld's important studies of the elections of 1944 and 1948, social scientists have argued that campaigns reinforce the political orientations of voters and mobilize them to vote rather than convert large segments of the population to new ways of thinking or new patterns of behavior (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Key 1966; Campbell 1960).

Recent social science research has further refined our understanding of reinforcement. The stylized facts that emerge from this research are that campaign communications are reinforcing for different groups within the electorate, depending on their partisan orientation and prior levels of information and interest (Zaller 1992). Partisans, especially low information partisans, seem to be particularly susceptible to messages from their own party's candidates. Partisans seem resistant to messages that are sponsored by the opposing party or that favor the opposing party. Nonpartisans seem to behave somewhat differently. Low information nonpartisans seem to tune out political messages of all sort, but the high information nonpartisans seem to be particularly influenced by political communications.

But there is a fundamental problem with reinforcement arguments. People seem to throw away the public information...