Todd G. Shields

The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns

List of Illustrations ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii Chapter One: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns 1 Chapter Two: The Reciprocal Campaign 18 Chapter Three: Measuring the Persuadable Partisan 49 Chapter Four: Capturing Campaign Persuasion 82 Chapter Five: The Republican Southern Strategy: A Case Study of the Reciprocal Campaign 107 Chapter Six: Candidate Strategy in the 2004 Campaign 145 Chapter Seven: Conclusions: Consequences for Democratic Governance 183 Appendix 1: Question Wording and Coding 205 Appendix 2: Content Analysis Coding 214 Appendix 3: Statistical Results 216 Bibliography 223 Index 237

Moral Issues and Voter Decision Making in the 2004 Presidential Election

“President Bushs victory, the approval of every anti-gay marriage amendment on statewide ballots and an emphasis on ‘moral values’ among voters showed the power of churchgoing Americans in this election and threw the nations religious divide into stark relief.” Associated Press , November 4, 2004

Interpretation of Interaction Effects in Logit and Probit Analyses Reconsidering the Relationship Between Registration Laws, Education, and Voter Turnout

Scholars have argued that more restrictive registration laws most drastically deter the least educated citizens from political participation. Others, however, argue that the most educated, rather than the least educated, are most drastically impeded by restrictive registration requirements. These opposing conclusions have dramatically different implications concerning registration reform in the United States. In this analysis, we urge scholars to take the arguments made by Nagler more seriously, and we argue that past models have not fully considered the inherently nonlinear functional form of the logit and probit models. Using graphical displays, we show that citizens with moderate levels of education are actually those who are “hardest hit” by restrictive closing dates. Consequently, we moderate all prior conclusions and show evidence that it is neither the most nor the least educated who are the “hardest hit” by early closing dates.

Enabling Democracy: Disability and Voter Turnout

How likely are the millions of Americans with disabilities to participate in politics? What insights do their experiences provide into overall participation levels and determinants? This article reports the results of a nationally representative household telephone survey of 1,240 peoplestratified to include 700 people with disabilities-following the November 1998 elections. Voter turnout is found to be 20 percentage points lower among people with disabilities than among people without disabilities who have otherwise-similar demographic characteristics. Other standard predictors of turnout such as political efficacy and mobilization explain only a small portion of this gap. There is great variation within the disability sample: the lower turnout is concentrated among people with disabilities who are not employed or who are age 65 or older, who have had recent onset of a disabling condition, and who have difficulty going outside alone (despite the availability of absentee ballots). The findings suggest that disability, apart from imposing resource constraints, often has social and psychological effects that decrease voter turnout through decreased social capital and identification with mainstream society, particularly among senior citizens. The findings also support the idea that general mobility and major life transitions can be important influences on voter turnout in general, and raise questions on the causal relations among age, employment, efficacy, and voter turnout that should be a focus of future research.

Participation Rates, Socioeconomic Class Biases, and Congressional Elections: A Crossvalidation

Theory: Recently, Leighley and Nagler (1992) presented evidence indicating that class biases in voter turnout remained relatively stable across presidential elections from 1960 through 1988. Nevertheless, few investigations test for class biases (or the stability of class biases) in midterm congressional elections. Given that presidential elections are such high-intensity affairs (Campbell 1993) some lower-class citizens likely participate in presidential elections as a result of the sheer salience of the campaign but may be less likely to be mobilized in the lower intensity midterm elections. Consequently, we might expect to find evidence of an increase in class bias in the shrinking congressional electorate rather than in the shrinking presidential electorate. Hypothesis: Class biases in voter turnout have not substantially increased since the 1960s. Methods: A demographic model of voter turnout is used in order to isolate the marginal impact of income on voter turnout across election years using the American National Election Studies 1958-94 and the Current Population Surveys 1974-94. Results: While class biases in any specific election are great (higher socioeconomic groups comprise the majority of voters) such biases appear to have remained relatively stable over time. The declining rates of turnout since the early 1960s have occurred among all segments of society, not just among the lower classes.

Priming Theory and Ras Models: Toward an Integrated Perspective of Media Influence

Contemporary political science research into the effects of the mass media has focused largely on either priming theory or Receive, Accept, and Sample (RAS) models but rarely on both simultaneously. The separation of the two approaches is unfortunate because the predictions generated by the two theoretical perspectives are not mutually exclusive, and research may benefit greatly from a more integrated perspective. In the present study, we demonstrate how each perspective contributes to an understanding of changes in presidential approval during the 1992 presidential elections. We then present evidence demonstrating that both media priming and attitude change occur simultaneously. As such, research focusing solely on priming theory or research focusing solely on attitude change necessarily underestimates the total influence of the mass media on individual-level attitudes.

State Campaign Finance Regulations and Electoral Competition

In the following analysis, we provide an assessment of the effect of campaign finance reform on campaign spending and electoral competition in gubernatorial campaigns. The work improves on prior research by considering a longer, more comprehensive time frame (1978-1997) and by examining the effects of several different components of reform (contribution limits, public financing, and spending limits) within a single analytic framework. We find that spending limits reduce candidate spending and have an indirect and negative effect on electoral competition. The negative effects of spending limits, however, are heavily contingent on the level at which the limit is set. Contribution limits are associated with increased disparities in candidate spending and increased incumbent spending but have no direct effects on electoral competition. Overall, whether campaign finance reform enhances or inhibits electoral competition depends very much on the combination of spending limits, contribution limits, and public financing enacted in a given state.

Ideological Realignment in the Contemporary U.S. Electorate Revisited

In this study, we revisit the ideological-realignment theory proposed by Abramowitz and Saunders (1998) by assessing the varying impact a persons ideology had on his or her partisan identification for individuals in different regions and between men and women. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

The Disability Voice in American Politics Political Participation of People With Disabilities in the 1994 Election

The health of a democracy depends on citizen involvement in political life. Unfortunately, not all citizens have an equal voice in American governance. Previous research has demonstrated that individual factors such as higher levels of educational attainment and income (as well as institutional factors and political context) are associated with higher levels of participation, but extant research does not consider the role of disability in affecting participation. The research reported here indicates that registration and voting rates among individuals with disabilities are well below those of nondisabled people. Further, people with disabilities are much less likely to vote as they age—unlike nondisabled individuals, who are much more likely to vote over the lifespan. These results suggest that people with disabilities are a pivotal test of the generalizability of current knowledge regarding why Americans do and do not participate in political life.

Network news construction of homelessness: 1980–1993

Through an extensive content analysis of 14 years of television nightly news stories, evidence is presented showing coverage of homelessness corresponded more to seasonal variations than actual changes in the plight of the homeless. In addition, news coverage appeared to reify boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable while masking socioeconomic factors central to homelessness during the 1980s and early 1990s. Finally, implications are drawn concerning the likely effects of news portrayal of homelessness as an individual problem requiring individual acts of kindness rather than a systemic problem demanding institutional and societal change.