Campaign Communications in U.S. Congressional Elections

Abstract

E lectoral campaigns are a defining feature of democratic polities. Yet scholarship on electoral campaigns, particularly on the content of campaign communications, remains disjointed. The field has not changed very much since Riker's (1996, 4) description over a decade ago: "we have very little knowledge about the rhetorical content of campaigns, which is, however, their principal feature . . . the fact remains that we know very little about what to say in campaigns-but this is what both political scientists and candidates want to know." Shortcomings are particularly acute in the United States for nonpresidential campaigns. "From reading our literature," notes Perloff (2002, 621), "you would assume that the only campaigns in America are for the presidency."In what follows, we advance research on campaigns, focusing on communication in U.S. congressional campaigns. We begin by offering a framework for studying campaign communication that integrates and extends prior work. The analysis focuses on the extent to which candidates take risks or play it safe in their campaign strategies. We test expectations from the framework James N. Druckman is Associate Professor of Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 601 University Place, Evanston, IL 60208 (druckman@ northwestern.edu).Martin J. Kifer is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Survey Research Center, High Point University, 833 Montlieu Avenue, High Point, NC 27262 (mkifer@highpoint.edu).Michael Parkin is Assistant Professor of Politics, Oberlin College, 10 N. Professor Street, Oberlin, OH 44074 (Michael. Parkin@oberlin.edu).We thank Nora Paul and Brian Southwell for critical guidance in constructing our original coding framework, Gary Jacobson for providing candidate background data, and the dozens of individuals who assisted in data collection. We also thank Lonna Atkeson, Amber Wichowsky, and many others for providing advice. We owe a special debt of gratitude to the APSR's reviewers and editors for insightful guidance that fundamentally shaped all aspects of the paper. Support for this research was provided by the University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, Northwestern University's AT&T Research Scholar Fund, and, for the survey of website designers, the National Science Foundation (SES-0822819 and SES-0822819). Authors' names are listed in alphabetical order.with new data based on candidate Web sites over time, which offer an unmediated, holistic, and representative portrait of campaigns. The view from these data significantly differs from that of previous studies that rely on advertising and newspaper stories to study candidate behavior. Our efforts provide researchers with a foundation for moving toward a more complete understanding of congressional campaigns. CONGRESSIONAL CAMPAIGN RHETORICAL STRATEGYIn many ways, the literature on congressional campaigns is progressive and wide-ranging. Scholars devote considerable attention to distinct topics, such as go...

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