David A. M. Peterson

Ideology and Learning in Policy Diffusion

Scholarly research on the diffusion of policies across state governments focuses predominantly on the pathways of information between the states. Absent from this research is a thorough discussion of the content of the information state governments use when deciding whether or not to adopt an innovative policy. Given the importance of information in decision making, we develop a model that focuses attention on one type of information, namely, the ideological position of previous adopters. Although not the only piece of relevant information, we believe that states look to the previous adopters in an effort to minimize the uncertainty about how issues fit in the liberalconservative policy space. We test this theory in three different policy areas, finding consistent evidence that ideological cues help states learn about policy innovations while replicating important findings from previous research.

Theoretical and Empirical Implications of Attitude Strength

Attitude strength is defined as the extent to which an attitude is stable, resistant to change, impacts information processing, and guides behavior. Several concepts, such as accessibility, ambivalence, and importance relate to the broader concept of strength. For many years, both social psychology and political science ignored the differences across these various concepts, though in different ways. Social psychologists treated them as interchangeable, as indicators of the same latent concept. Political scientists treated them in isolation, focusing on one type of strength and ignoring the other, possibly relevant types. Recent research in both fields, however, challenges these approaches. Indicators of attitude strength are distinct concepts, and these differences are important empirically and theoretically. In this essay, we review the developments in both disciplines and make suggestions for how scholars should use and operationalize these concepts.

When Primary Campaigns Go Negative: The Determinants of Campaign Negativity

Standard investigations of both campaign negativity and primary elections focus on either the electoral institutions or the primary voters. In this article, we begin to explore the factors affecting the content of the information environment voters face by examining the effects of timing and electoral context on which primary races are likely to become negative and when. Using a content analysis of newspaper coverage of every contested Senate primary in 1998, and binary time-series cross-sectional methods, we demonstrate that negativity is an interdependent function of the timing of the race, the status of the Senate seat, and the number and quality of the challengers in the primary.

Congressional Response to Mandate Elections

Elections from time to time are widely believed to carry a mandate, to express a message about changed policy preferences of the electorate. Whatever the accuracy of such beliefs—a matter about which we are skeptical—perceptions of a mandate should affect the behavior of actors in government. Politicians lack the scholarly luxury of waiting for careful analyses. They must act in the months following elections. We postulate that many will act as if the mandate perceptions were true, veering away from their normal voting patterns. This is driven by election results and interpretations that undermine old calculations about what voters want. As the flow of information gradually changes these perceptions, and the election becomes more distant, members of Congress return to their normal position. We first ask, how would members observe an emerging consensus of mandate? And then we model the duration of the change in behavior in an event-history framework. That permits a depiction of important movements of the median member and, from this, inferences about policy impact.

The Impact of Negative Campaigning: Evidence from the 1998 Senatorial Primaries

We investigate the amount of negative campaigning in the 1998 senato- rial primaries and the ramifications of negative campaigning on primary turnout and general election outcomes. A large literature has developed to show whether primary divisiveness has significant consequences for electoral outcomes, though we do not have much knowledge about what primary divisiveness entails (Bernstein 1977: 540). We employ a holistic measure of campaign negativity measured by coding newspaper articles three months prior to the primary to uncover how much negativity exists in senatorial primaries, which campaigns turn negative, and the relation- ship between primary negativity and several campaign factors. We find that primary divisiveness is strongly related to campaign negativity, neg- ativity boosts primary turnout, while divisiveness depletes a nominees general election fortunes.

Electoral Mandates in American Politics

Political science has not come to terms with the idea of electoral mandates. The disciplines view is a hodgepodge of competing claims. In this article we review the empirical issues about mandates asking whether or not mandates occur and with what effect. We observe evidence of mandates as social constructions, as dialogues in the Washington community and in the press which serves it.We find that these dialogues accurately reflect election results – consensus emerges from actual sweeping election victories and not from mere strategic attempts to claim policy mandates. We find that Congress is highly responsive to the consensus interpretation. It engages in bursts of unusual policy activity which run for some months and then cease. And we find that these have a substantial policy legacy, that the changes that occur in these bursts produce some of the most important movements in American public policy.

Understanding Institutional Change Legislative Staff Development and the State Policymaking Environment

The study of state legislative change is dominated by concerns with the development of professional legislatures, but do the components of a professional legislature develop in the sameway? If not, what accounts for change in state legislative institutions? We separate legislative staff from the larger concept of professionalism and offer a theory that explains staff development and its impact on both legislative activity and conflict with the governor. We demonstrate that staff size and organizational structure respond to internal and external competitive pressures and they in turn have an affect on the larger policy environment separate from professionalism.

Aww, Shucky Ducky: Voter Response to Accusations of Herman Cain’s “Inappropriate Behavior”

In a Fox News Poll from October 23 to 25, Herman Cain’s 24% led all candidates for the GOP nomination. On October 30, 2011, Politico reported that two women accused Cain of sexual harassment and misconduct. Two additional women came forward to accuse Cain of sexual harassment.4 In late November, a fifth woman alleged that she had a 13-year affair with Cain. Although Cain denied the allegations and the affair, he suspended his campaign on December 3 as a result of these “character assassinations.”6 This rapid deterioration of Cain’s presidential trajectory illustrates that the public seems to care about the scandalous behavior of candidates. Although several studies identify a negative eff ect of scandal on the public’s attitudes, individual-level predispositions often moderate this reaction. Specifically, motivated reasoning encourages biased processing of scandalous information such that a candidate’s fellow partisans are least affected by the scandal. Disciplines American Politics | Political Science Comments This article is from PS: Political Science & Politics 47 (2014): 372–378, doi:10.1017/S1049096514000237. Posted with permission. This article is available at Iowa State University Digital Repository: http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/pols_pubs/1

Uncertainty and Campaigns The Psychological Mechanism Behind Campaign-Induced Priming

Campaigns change how some people vote. How campaigns have this effect is less well understood. The prevailing view is that these effects occur by changing the content of voters’ attitudes such as partisanship or issue positions (persuasion) and by changing the weights voters applied to these determinants of vote choice (priming). Recent research has challenged this view and suggests that the support for these priming and persuasion effects is overstated. Unfortunately, no research directly specifies and tests the specific psychological mechanism responsible for campaign priming. In this article, I draw on the differences in the forms of attitude strength and demonstrate that changes in citizens’ uncertainty are responsible for these effects. The results suggest that persuasion and changes in uncertainty (but not ambivalence or importance) are responsible for the changes in voters’ decisions during the campaign. Substantively, the largest effects occur because of changes in the uncertainty voters have about the nature of the candidates’ character traits.

Automated Coding of Political Video Ads for Political Science Research

With the advent of new media technology and the ability to identify more information about potential voters, political campaigns have aggressively changed their campaign strategies. Election campaigns increasingly rely on online video advertising to reach voters. Until now, the contents of these ads are manually coded for political science research to study campaign strategies. Manual coding is tremendously time consuming and not scalable to handle the expected increase in online ads. We make the first attempt to investigate automated coding of the content of political video ads for political science research. Specifically, we focus on the problem of classifying a political ad into one of these categories: attack ads, promoting ads, and contrast ads. Together with the domain expert, we introduce a concrete definition for each of these categories. We made available the ground truth labels of 773 political ads of the 2016 primary presidential election. We investigate the effectiveness of several classifiers using single modality and two modalities. The best average F1 score is 0.845 using text features from audio and embedded text in image frames.