Information, Activation, and Electoral Competition in the 2002 Congressional Elections

Abstract

Although uncompetitive races for the House of Representatives produce formidable challenges to long-held democratic ideals regarding popular control and meaningful citizen involvement, little is known regarding the significance of variance in district-level competitiveness for the perceptions and behaviors of voters. Do citizens know that the outcomes of most U.S. House elections are foregone conclusions? Does the actual political climate of the district influence citizens' perceptions regarding electoral competitiveness, and, ultimately, the decision to vote? Does campaign activity influence citizens' perceptions? Do these various perceptions and behaviors hinge in part on the citizen's level of political knowledge? These questions are addressed through analysis of data from a study that oversamples citizens located in competitive House districts during the 2002 midterm election.

The Consequences of Concurrent Campaigns for Citizen Knowledge of Congressional Candidates

“…In presidential years, the density of presidential advertising is also positively associated with campaign contacts. This confirms results from prior studies (Gimpel, Kaufmann, and Pearson-Merkowitz 2007;Huckfeldt et al 2007;Jacobson 2001;Wolak 2006) and suggests an indirect route of influence for concurrent campaigns. 14 To test whether the effects are due to Senate campaign tone, I rely on the percent of negative statements in the campaign newspaper and magazine articles collected and coded by Lau and Pomper (2004).…”

“…I rely on the campaign intensity measures rather than measures of competitiveness as I see these as most closely related to my proposed theoretical mechanism of influence, where the density of competing campaign messages affects learning about House candidates. Prior studies suggest that factors like campaign contacts, candidate spending, and ad density tend to be more closely related to campaign effects like higher turnout than simply a narrow margin of victory, perhaps because they better capture the level of competitiveness and campaign intensity that prospective voters actually experience (Cox and Munger 1989;Huckfeldt et al 2007;Jackson and Carsey 2007). I also estimated the models using measures of electoral closeness instead of the candidate spending measures.…”

“…4 This measure is derived from data collected by the Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG) and compiled and made public by Kenneth Goldstein and the Wisconsin Advertising Project. 5 2 Others have focused on the consequences of campaign competitiveness for voters, as measured by margin of victory (Huckfeldt et al 2007). Measures of closeness and campaign intensity tend to be highly correlated.…”

“…Measures of closeness and campaign intensity tend to be highly correlated. In this dataset, gubernatorial campaign spending and competitiveness (measured as in Huckfeldt et al 2007) correlate at 0.92. Senate campaign spending and closeness are also highly correlated (r = 0.8).…”

The Roots of the Gender Gap in Political Knowledge in Adolescence

“…Young women, who are more likely to say they dislike political discussion, may instead gain little knowledge when partisan conflict prevails. To explore this, we rely on the measure of partisan division and competitiveness proposed by Huckfeldt et al (2007). Constructed as 4(p)(1 -p), where p is the Republican share of the two-party county vote for president in 2004, the measure takes a value of 1 in the counties with the most partisan competition and 0 in counties marked by partisan consensus.…”