Jacob R. Neiheisel

By Ground or By Air? Voter Mobilization During the United States' 2008 Presidential Campaign

ABSTRACT Aggregate studies find no effect of campaign advertising on voter turnout in the United States, thereby calling into question experimental and survey-based studies that produce strong turnout effects. In revisiting the debate over the impact of campaign ads, this paper examines the effects of both TV campaign advertising and campaign field offices on aggregate voter turnout during the 2008 US presidential election campaign. In contrast to previous studies, our analysis finds that both campaign field offices and campaign advertising help to stimulate turnout, although the effect of campaign field offices is more robust to alternative model specifications. We also find that only Obamas field offices had any discernible impact on aggregate voter turnout, thereby reinforcing the narrative that the Obama campaign had a superior ground game in 2008.

Reconciling Legal-Institutional and Behavioral Perspectives on Voter Turnout Theory and Evidence from Pennsylvania, 1876–1948

Foundational studies in political science endeavored to explain the dynamics of voter turnout in America over time. Two theories, one focused on legal-institutional factors and the other on behavioral elements such as party mobilization strategies, were born from the need to account for temporal fluctuations in aggregate voter turnout. A comprehensive test of these competing theories has been hindered by the fact that reliable measures of the behavioral factors driving turnout have proven elusive. In this article, I develop and test an interactive theory of voter turnout that focuses on the impact of legal-institutional barriers to the franchise conditional on party organizational strength and mobilization efforts. To this end, I use data on the circulation of party-sponsored newspapers, coupled with information on the spread of voter registration requirements, to capture the effects of both behavioral and legal-institutional factors in Pennsylvania between 1876 and 1948. My results offer modest empirical support for an interactive theory of aggregate voter turnout. In isolation, however, the effects of behavioral factors are quite limited. On the contrary, legal-institutional variables exert a sizable impact on voter turnout in the state. Contrary to other recent work on the subject, careful analysis of the Pennsylvania case therefore provides a great deal of evidence in favor of legal-institutional accounts of the changes in aggregate voter turnout that were witnessed at the beginning of the twentieth century while demonstrating that behavioral factors, such as the decline of the partisan press, served to enhance the deleterious effects of legal reforms on turnout.

Are the Politics of the Christian Right Linked to State Rates of the Nonreligious? The Importance of Salient Controversy:

Hout and Fischer have made the repeated, controversial claim that the dramatic rise of “religious nones” in the United States is due to the prominence of the politics of the Christian Right. As the argument goes, the movement’s extreme stands on gay rights and abortion make religion inhospitable to those who take more moderate and liberal positions. We take another look at this proposition with novel data drawing on expert reports and interest group counts that capture the prominence of the movement in each American state from 2000 to 2010. We attach these data to decennial religious census data on the unchurched, as well as estimates of the nones from Cooperative Congressional Election Study data. At stake is whether religion is independent of political influence and whether American religion is sowing its own fate by failing to limit taking extreme stands. Rising none rates are more common in Republican states in this period. Moreover, when the Christian Right comes into more public conflict, such as over same-sex marriage bans, the rate of religious nones climbs.

The “L” Word Anti-liberal Campaign Rhetoric, Symbolic Ideology, and the Electoral Fortunes of Democratic Candidates

In recent years, the electorate has sorted along ideological lines. Republican identifiers have grown more likely to self-identify as conservatives. Democrats, however, have been slow to embrace the liberal label. And while many Americans are operationally liberal and express support for liberal policy positions, in symbolic terms, the American electorate is much more conservative in nature and appears reluctant to hew to the liberal label. The uneven nature of partisan sorting and the observed symbolic/operational divide have both been linked to Republican efforts at making “liberal” a dirty word, but researchers have yet to offer a direct test of the effects of exposure to anti-liberal rhetoric. In this study, I rectify this shortcoming using the 2004 University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW)/Brigham Young University (BYU) panel study coupled with data on the content of candidates’ campaign advertising from the Wisconsin Advertising Project. I find that exposure to anti-liberal campaign messages had a direct effect on evaluations of Democratic candidates, vote intention, and vote choice, but only in senate races. At the same time, self-identified ideology was unmoved by elite efforts at disparaging the liberal label—thereby calling into question simple versions of a common explanation for the existence of conservative Democrats and “conflicted” conservatives.