Title: Campaign Rhetoric and the Incumbency Advantage
The congressional incumbency advantage reflects an inequity in competition—candidates receive an electoral edge simply because they hold office. Scholars have identified an array of factors that contribute to the incumbency advantage; however, the role of electoral campaigns has been largely ignored. We argue that campaigns are a mechanism through which the incumbency advantage works. All else constant, incumbents focus their campaigns on factors that reflect their standing position, such as their familiarity to voters and actions taken for their district/state. Voters consequently rely on such incumbency factors when making their decisions. The outcome is challengers are at an extreme disadvantage, and campaigns offer scant substantive engagement. We offer evidence for these dynamics with a large-scale content analysis of campaign websites and an experiment. In so doing, we highlight a challenge to theories of democratic representation that focus on equal competition and/or substantive campaign engagement. more »« less
Druckman, James N.; Kifer, Martin J.; Parkin, Michael
(, Social Science Computer Review)
null
(Ed.)
This article explores congressional campaigning on the web in 2016. What impact did the unique nature of the 2016 election have on those involved with the creation and maintenance of congressional campaign websites? Did it cause them to alter their approach to online campaigning? Using data from a survey of campaign insiders, we find that the factors that influence how congressional campaigns view and use their websites were largely impervious to the unique electoral environment. Results show that, consistent with previous election years, campaigns maintained a fairly uniform view of likely visitors and target audiences, and they tended to see their campaign websites as digital hubs, best used for capturing the campaign’s overall message. We also find that, as in other years, nonincumbents continued to use their websites to campaign more aggressively than incumbents. Overall, the results suggest that congressional campaigning on the web is primarily driven by stable factors that transcend technological advancements and shifts in the political environment.
Shiro Kuriwaki
(, Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Government, Harvard University)
With each successive election since at least 1994, congressional elections in the United States have transitioned toward nationalized two-party government. Fewer voters split their tickets for different parties between President and Congress. Regional blocs and incumbency voting --- a key feature of U.S. elections in the latter 20th century --- appear to have given way to strong party discipline among candidates and nationalized partisanship among voters. Observers of modern American politics are therefore tempted to write off the importance of the swing voter, defined here as voters who are indifferent between the two parties and thus likely to split their ticket or switch their party support. By assembling data from historical elections (1950 -- 2020), surveys (2008 -- 2018), and cast vote record data (2010 -- 2018), and through developing statistical methods to analyze such data, I argue that although they comprise a smaller portion of the electorate, each swing voter is disproportionately decisive in modern American politics, a phenomenon I call the swing voter paradox. Historical comparisons across Congressional, state executive, and state legislative elections confirm the decline in aggregate measures of ticket splitting suggested in past work. But the same indicator has not declined nearly as much in county legislative or county sheriff elections (Chapter 1). Ticket splitters and party switchers tend to be voters with low news interest and ideological moderate. Consistent with a spatial voting model with valence, voters also become ticket splitters when incumbents run (Chapter 2). I then provide one of the first direct measures of ticket splitting instate and local office using cast vote records. I find that ticket splitting is more prevalent in state and local elections (Chapter 3). This is surprising given the conventional wisdom that party labels serve as heuristics and down-ballot elections are low information environments. A major barrier for existing studies of the swing voter lies in the measurement from incomplete electoral data. Traditional methods struggle to extract information about subgroups from large surveys or cast vote records, because of small subgroup samples, multi-dimensional data, and systematic missingness. I therefore develop a procedure for reweighting surveys to small areas through expanding poststratification targets (Chapter 4), and a clustering algorithm for survey or ballot data with multiple offices to extract interpretable voting blocs (Chapter 5). I provide open-source software to implement both methods. These findings challenge a common characterization of modern American politics as one dominated by rigidly polarized parties and partisans. The picture that emerges instead is one where swing voters are rare but can dramatically decide the party in power, and where no single demographic group is a swing voter. Instead of entrenching elections into red states and blue states, nationalization may heighten the role of the persuadable voter.
Lu, Jasper; Zhang, David; Rabinovich, Zinovi; Obraztsova, Svetlana; Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy
(, International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems)
Constructive election control considers the problem of an adversary who seeks to sway the outcome of an electoral process in order to ensure that their favored candidate wins. We consider the computational problem of constructive election control via issue selection. In this problem, a party decides which political issues to focus on to ensure victory for the favored candidate. We also consider a variation in which the goal is to maximize the number of voters supporting the favored candidate. We present strong negative results, showing, for example, that the latter problem is inapproximable for any constant factor. On the positive side, we show that when issues are binary, the problem becomes tractable in several cases, and admits a 2-approximation in the two-candidate case. Finally, we develop integer programming and heuristic methods for these problems.
My research asks the following questions: What are the ramifications of male dominance in positions of power? Do they adequately address the concerns of women constituents? How do electoral quotas influence the trajectory of political careers for underrepresented groups? Which subgroups derive the greatest benefits from quota implementation? How do voters respond to the introduction of quotas, and what factors shape their reactions? I theorize and offer causal evidence on the consequences of inequitable political representation and the role of quotas in remedying disparities in political inequality. Through a combination of observational and experimental data spanning various levels ranging from legislatures to voters, my research examines quotas (or lack thereof) from multiple perspectives using a range of methodological approaches. My research demonstrates that while there is a risk of neglecting policy issues faced by underrepresented groups in legislative spaces, indicating the need for institutionalizing quotas, quotas can have asymmetric effects on citizens’ political behavior. Quotas can bridge gaps in political participation by demobilizing dominant groups while simultaneously mobilizing underrepresented groups. However, their repercussions extend beyond the realm of politics and have implications for intergroup relations. Thus, my research highlights the nuances of political representation and examines the effects of quotas on governance structures and political behavior. My dissertation comprises three distinct yet interconnected empirical chapters, all situated within the context of India. Overall, this dissertation offers lessons not only for those interested in Indian politics but also for everyone seeking to understand the role of quotas in addressing political inequality.
Nelson, Michael J.; Driscoll, Amanda
(, Journal of Law and Courts)
How does the public respond to court-packing attempts? Longstanding accounts of public support for courts suggest voters retaliate against incumbents who seek to manipulate well-respected courts. Yet incumbents might strategically frame their efforts in bureaucratic terms to minimize the public’s outcry or use court-packing proposals to activate a partisan base of support. Drawing on a series of survey experiments, we demonstrate that strategic politicians can minimize electoral backlash by couching court reform proposals in apolitical language, and institutional legitimacy’s shielding effect dissolves in the face of shared partisanship. These results shed new light on how ambitious politicians might avoid electoral consequences for efforts to bend the judiciary to their will.
Druckman, James N, Kifer, Martin J., and Parkin, Michael. Campaign Rhetoric and the Incumbency Advantage. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10208015. American politics research 18.1 Web. doi:10.1177/1532673X18822314.
Druckman, James N, Kifer, Martin J., & Parkin, Michael. Campaign Rhetoric and the Incumbency Advantage. American politics research, 18 (1). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10208015. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X18822314
@article{osti_10208015,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Campaign Rhetoric and the Incumbency Advantage},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10208015},
DOI = {10.1177/1532673X18822314},
abstractNote = {The congressional incumbency advantage reflects an inequity in competition—candidates receive an electoral edge simply because they hold office. Scholars have identified an array of factors that contribute to the incumbency advantage; however, the role of electoral campaigns has been largely ignored. We argue that campaigns are a mechanism through which the incumbency advantage works. All else constant, incumbents focus their campaigns on factors that reflect their standing position, such as their familiarity to voters and actions taken for their district/state. Voters consequently rely on such incumbency factors when making their decisions. The outcome is challengers are at an extreme disadvantage, and campaigns offer scant substantive engagement. We offer evidence for these dynamics with a large-scale content analysis of campaign websites and an experiment. In so doing, we highlight a challenge to theories of democratic representation that focus on equal competition and/or substantive campaign engagement.},
journal = {American politics research},
volume = {18},
number = {1},
author = {Druckman, James N and Kifer, Martin J. and Parkin, Michael},
editor = {null}
}
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