The Role of Partisan Context and Dynamics in Campaign Issue Emphases
Year: 2011
Type: preprint
Abstract: Election campaigns are dynamic political events during which candidates vie to control the information environment, thus defining the considerations that voters will face when before they cast a ballot. Much of the extant research focuses on the ways in which campaigns affect voters, significantly less research has explored the ways in which candidates interact with each other during campaigns. Even less research has examined candidate interaction as a dynamic process. I argue that candidates will shape their issue emphases based in part on the emphases of their opponents when an election is competitive. I offer two competing theories of candidate issue emphases in noncompetitive elections. I further argue that the partisan political context in which the campaign occurs will also affect issue emphases. I test my theory of candidate interaction and context using weekly advertising data from 38 Senate campaigns in 2002 and 2004. I find that the issue emphases of candidates converge in competitive elections and diverge in noncompetitive elections. I find limited support for any kind of partisan contextual effects.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: Kevin K. Banda
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1600384879