Keena Lipsitz

What voters want from political campaign communication

Conventional wisdom holds that the public dislikes campaigns for their negativity and superficiality, preferring a cleaner, substantive, and more deliberative process. By contrast, the implication of Hibbing and Theiss-Morses (2002) Stealth Democracy is that, while citizens will indeed dislike campaigns, they do not necessarily desire more deliberation, debate, and discussion of issues. Instead they want simple cues that allow them to size up candidates with minimal effort. In this article, we test these theories with survey and focus group data collected during the 2002 California gubernatorial race. Ultimately, the ideal campaign envisioned by the public falls somewhere between the substantive and participatory campaign envisioned by reformers and what we call an “undemanding campaign.” We also find that attitudes toward campaigns vary substantially based on political involvement and demographic attributes. Most important, politically involved citizens desire the more substantive campaigns envisioned by reformers, but less involved citizens want less demanding campaigns. This finding suggests not only that any generalizations about what the public wants from campaigns must be cautious, but also that reformers may need to tailor their proposals to the tastes of different groups of citizens if these proposals are to be effective.

Do Voters Perceive Negative Campaigns as Informative Campaigns

We argue that citizens distinguish the tone of a campaign from the quality of information that it provides and that evaluations on each dimension respond differently to positive and negative political advertising. We test these claims using survey and advertising data from the 2000 presidential campaign and two 1998 gubernatorial races. In each race, citizens separate judgments about the tone of a campaign from judgments about the quality of information they have received. Furthermore, negative campaigning affects the former, but not the latter, set of evaluations. These results have implications for the debate over the impact of negative advertising and for how citizens perceive campaigns as political processes.

Competitive Elections and the American Voter

List of Illustrations Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Democratic Theory and the Campaign Information Environment Chapter 3. Electoral Competitiveness and the Campaign Information Environment Chapter 4. Competitiveness and Campaign Knowledge in Congressional Elections Chapter 5. Competitiveness and Campaign Knowledge in a Presidential Election Chapter 6. Competitiveness and Political Participation Chapter 7. Improving Electoral Competitiveness Through Reform Epilogue: Why Voters Are Not Excited by American Campaigns Appendix Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

Filled Coffers: Campaign Contributions and Contributors in the 2008 Elections

The presidential candidates alone in 2008 raised a stunning

Issue Convergence Is Nothing More than Issue Convergence

1.75 billion, which was double the

Orphan Counties and the Effect of Irrelevant Information on Turnout in Statewide Races

881 million raised by candidates during the 2004 election cycle and more than triple the

Rethinking the Concept of Negativity: An Empirical Approach

529 million raised by candidates in 2000. 1 Virtually all of this money was raised from individual contributions. In this article, the authors use survey data to examine the individual characteristics and political attitudes of contributors in 2008.

The Consequences of Battleground and “Spectator” State Residency for Political Participation

It is widely assumed that candidate issue convergence or “dialogue” is beneficial for voters in campaigns. Using a lagged weekly measure of issue convergence in political advertising about specific campaign issues from the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, I show that dialogue, as it is currently defined by campaigns and elections scholars, is as likely to harm voters as it is to help them. These findings require scholars to think more deeply about what role, if any, issue convergence plays in deliberative campaigns.

Campaigns & Elections: Rules, Reality, Strategy, Choice

Over 10% of the American electorate lives in counties served by out-of-state media because of the mismatch between media markets and state boundaries. Frequently, these “orphan” counties face a different information environment than others in their home state: they receive no news coverage and political advertising for their own statewide races, irrelevant information pertaining to candidates in the neighboring state who will not appear on their ballots, or both. With a combination of county-level, individual-level, and political advertising data, our analysis evaluates the effect of orphan county residency and irrelevant political information on political participation. Results indicate that orphan counties have lower turnout rates than non-orphan counties and that this difference is explained by lower levels of interest in the campaign stemming from exposure to irrelevant information.

Candidate Attacks and Voter Aversion: The Uncertain Link Between Negativity and Campaign Satisfaction

Over the last twenty years, there has been a tremendous amount written on “negativity” in political campaigns. Yet, there is a conceptual disconnect between the definition of negativity used by researchers and how citizens define negativity. In this article, we show how large this disparity is and what its consequences are. Using a nationally representative online survey of 17,400 Americans and nearly 100 scholars of American politics who viewed presidential ads from the 2012 general election, we show that citizen perceptions of negativity are much stronger predictors of political participation than scholar codings of negativity. This means researchers need to give serious thought to how they operationalize negativity in their work. If we have any interest in understanding how voters are affected by campaign information that they perceive as being negative, then we must collect data consistent with the public’s understanding of negativity. Otherwise, we risk the continuation of this conceptual disconnect.