Campaign Advertising: Partisan Convergence or Divergence?

Abstract

Prior research demonstrates that many citizens are unable to perceive differences between the two major political parties. In order to investigate whether candidate behavior in campaigns contributes to this perception, we test implications about partisan constraints on campaign rhetoric drawn from the literature on parties and policy convergence. Our results suggest that candidates of different parties do not highlight the same issues or positions in their campaign advertising. We find that campaign rhetoric is strongly motivated by party even when controlling for constituency characteristics and other factors. Thus, there is convergence among candidates of the same party across districts and states and divergence between opposing candidates within districts and states. Our results are based on a detailed content analysis of more than 1,000 campaign advertisements aired by 290 candidates in 153 elections in 37 states during the 1998 midterm elections.

Issue Engagement in Election Campaigns The Impact of Electoral Incentives and Organizational Constraints

“…While some research shows that parties indeed fail to address the same topics in campaigns Farlie 1983, Spiliotes andVavreck 2002), other studies have found that parties in fact do engage with each other (Sigelman and Buell 2004, Damore 2005, Green-Pedersen 2007, Dolezal et al 2014. In any case, it is not possible to say that party competition in general is driven either by engagement or avoidance as issue engagement will vary across parties and by issue area (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen forthcoming; Kaplan et al 2006;Wagner and Meyer 2014).…”

“…While most comparable studies of press releases are based on policy areas (e.g. Brandenburg 2002, Hopmann et al 2012, Spiliotes and Vavreck 2002, Sigelman and Buell 2004, Tedesco 2005a, 2005b, we measure engagement at the level of individual issues. 1 Measures based on policy areas may identify high levels of issue engagement even when parties address issues that are completely unrelated to each other (see also Lipsitz 2013).…”

Setting the Agenda or Responding to Voters? Political Parties, Voters and Issue Attention

“…While some studies show that issue ownership influences what political parties talk about (e.g. Budge and Farlie 1983;Petrocik 1996;Petrocik et al 2003;Spiliotes and Vavreck 2002), others demonstrate that parties respond to the policy priorities of their voters (e.g. Klüver and Spoon 2014;Spoon and Klüver 2014;Wagner and Meyer 2014).…”

“…In addition, the vast majority of studies investigating selective issue emphasis of political parties focuses on political communication in the United States (e.g. Damore 2005;Petrocik 1996;Sides 2007;Sigelman and Buell 2004;Spiliotes and Vavreck 2002).…”

“…As a result, one could expect that the riding the wave theory might better explain parties' selective issue emphasis in multi-party systems as parties could settle on policy issues that are salient to the electorate while the issue ownership theory might be more suitable to explain the fierce competition between parties in a two-party system where each party is solely interested in maximising its own electoral benefits. What is more, previous research almost exclusively focused on issue competition in election campaigns (Damore 2005;Hayes 2008;Klüver and Spoon 2014;Sides 2007;Sigelman and Buell 2004;Spiliotes and Vavreck 2002;Spoon and Klüver 2014;Wagner and Meyer 2014). Election campaigns are very different from the day-to-day politics during the legislative term as they only cover a short period of heated political competition.…”