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This article explores the negative campaign messages made by presidential nomination candidates on their opponents. Using a compilation of national and state media accounts of candidate attack activity from the 1992 Democratic nomination race, we seek to answer the questions --are the intermediated attacks made by presidential nomination candidates random events or are they predictable consequences of measurable variables ? Moreover, when candidates attack, who is their likely target? We find that intermediated candidate attacks can be predicted based on a number of conditions. Among these conditions are competitive positioning, reward factors and media-related conditions. Moreover, the general foci of attacks appear to be limited to attacking those who are competitively in the top tier. Attacks vary both in their frequency and in their nature depending on the competitive stage of the campaign. The systematic evaluation of these opponent-focused negative messages and their role in candidate strategy and voter evaluation is important for understanding presidential nomination politics and strategic communication in elections in general.

Data from Great Britain and the United States from the late 1950s to the early 1990s show relatively little change in the frequency with which citizens engage in political discussions, with whom they are likely to speak, and the variables that shape their propensity to engage in political talk. In addition, analyses of the data show that discussing politics enhances citizens' knowledge of public affairs, even net of other variables known to affect political knowledge. Students of political behaviour and those interested in strengthening democracy need to treat political discussions as an important form of political participation.Although theorists have argued that citizens' political conversations contribute to democracy's well-being, 1 until recently empirical studies of politics have largely ignored this facet of political life. Research on political discussions in the United States has begun to shed useful light on hitherto unexplored territory. 2 With few exceptions, however, there has not been much attention to Studies, and Eurobarometer 37. 5 We ask several questions: (1) who talks about politics, (2) with whom do people engage in political discussions, (3) what variation occurs between the two countries and over time, and (4) does political discussion affect citizens' knowledge of public affairs?Most empirically oriented students of political participation have ignored discussions about public affairs among the citizenry because they define political participation as activities undertaken by private citizens in order to influence the selection of public officials and/or the policy decisions elites make. 6 There is, however, an older notion of participation that focuses on

This article seeks to analyze the relationship between turnout change and reform in the American states. Using pooled cross sections of state-level data, turnout and turnout change over time are compared to registration provisions at the same level. The registration closing date and motor-voter registration show a clear relationship to higher turnout, whereas mail registration and eased purge procedures do not. As a result, turnout gains because of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 are likely, but they will be modest.

Although scholars have long known that most Americans are woefully ignorant of foreign affairs (Almond 1960; Kriesberg 1949), they are uncertain about how the U.S. public's knowledge of international politics compares to that of people in other countries. We address this uncertainty with a study of citizens' knowledge of foreign affairs in five western democracies: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. The focus is on the roles each country's mass media play in the process by which citizens learn about international politics. The study found that Germans are the most knowledgeable about international politics, citizens in Britain, Canada, and France displayed moderate knowledge, and Americans had the least knowledge. We conclude that people learn about foreign affairs due to their opportunity, defined by their location in the social structure, and their motivation, indexed by attention paid to news accounts of world politics. The better educated and more politically attentive citizens also proved to be more informed in each country, whereas citizens who most often watched popular television entertainment programs proved to be less informed about foreign affairs.