Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change

Campbell, Angus

doi:10.1086/266960

Cited by 314 publications

(238 citation statements)

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“…To employ Angus Campbell's (1960) terminology, it is likely that the mobilizing impact of negative ads would be most apparent among peripheral voters.…”

Section: Election Study Data On Negative Advertising Exposure and Turmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer or Mobilizer?

1999

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With political campaigns becoming increasingly adversarial, scholars have recently given some much-needed attention to the impact of negative advertising on turnout. In a widely recognized Review article and subsequent book, Ansolabehere and his colleagues (1994, 1995) contend that attack advertising drives potential voters away from the polls. . We dispute the generalizability of these claims outside of the experimental setting. Using NES survey data as well aggregate sources, we subject this previous research to rigorous real-world testing. The survey data directly contradict Ansolabehere et al.'s findings, yielding evidence of a turnout advantage for those recollecting negative presidential campaign advertising. In attempting to replicate Ansolabehere et al's earlier aggregate results we uncover quite significant discrepancies and inconsistencies in their dataset. . This analysis leads to the conclusion that their aggregate study is hopelessly flawed. We must conclude that attack advertising's demobilization dangers are greatly exaggerated by Ansolabehere et al., while they completely miss negative political advertising's turnout benefits --at least in voters' own context. Although widely decried by pundits as polluting our national political debate, scholars have found that television advertising actually contributes to political learning (Brians and Wattenberg 1996;Patterson and McClure 1976). Currently, academic criticism of political ads concerns not how learning from them may manipulate whom people vote for but rather whether they will vote at all. Stephen Ansolabehere and his colleagues (Ansolabehere et al. 1994;Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995) argue that campaign advertising can be either mobilizing or demobilizing depending on its tone (hereafter these publications are collectively labeled 'Ansolabehere et al.,' unless specifically referenced individually). Through a set of controlled experiments, they show that subjects who view a negative ad embedded in a news broadcast are significantly less likely to say they will vote. 1 These findings are supplemented by an analysis of aggregate turnout and rolloff data from 1992 Senate races, which appear to show that participation is lower in states where candidates employ negative ads.Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995,9) boldly assert that "attack ads can be and are used strategically for demobilization." They argue that political strategists intentionally employ 1 negative ads to discourage segments of the electorate from voting and are well aware that lower turnout is the result. In our view, however, it hardly seems rational to limit the goal of campaign ads to influencing turnout. Imagine an election in which polling shows that 100 million people are expected to vote --53 million for the Democrat, and 47 million for the Republican. In order to win by reducing turnout, the Republicans would have to launch negative ads that would cause over 6 million Democratic supporters to stay home. But if they could change the minds of just over 3 million Democratic...

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“…To employ Angus Campbell's (1960) terminology, it is likely that the mobilizing impact of negative ads would be most apparent among peripheral voters.…”

Section: Election Study Data On Negative Advertising Exposure and Turmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer or Mobilizer?

1999

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“…Carrying out a systematic study of the interdependence of political behaviour in different types of elections was probably first proposed in the literature on United States (US) mid-term election results. The two main approaches of that literature are the 'surge and decline' theory (Campbell 1960) and the 'referendum' theory (Tufte 1975), with Stimson's (1976) cyclical model of presidential popularity somewhere in between. Contemporary German literature on the systematic connection between federal and state election results was also a fertiliser of the SOE model (Dinkel 1977).…”

Section: Properties Of Second-order Electionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The 2014 European Parliament Elections in Southern Europe: Second-Order or Critical Elections?

Schmitz

Teperoglou

2015

South European Society and Politics

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“…Two demographic changes in particular may have heightened district 195219561960196419681976 Figure 6.1 Trend in Partisan Bias, 1954 turnout and partisan differences and, thus, increased bias. The first de velopment is the large-scale immigration of lower socioeconomic groups, especially Hispanics, primarily settling in inner-city neighborhoods.…”

Section: Sociolegal Changes and Partisan Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a good deal of political diversity within most sociodemographic groups, and, while many groups have dis tinct political leanings, few would now argue, as the authors of The People's Choice did a half century ago, that "a person thinks, politically, as he is, socially" (Lazarsfeld et al, 1944, 27). Second, while many nonvoters have sociological similarities to Democratic voters, Campbell (1960) and DeNardo (1980) argue that their political distinctiveness is more telling. Nonvoters and occasional or peripheral voters tend to be less interested in politics and have less firmly held political beliefs and preferences.…”

Section: Turnout and Partisan Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cheap seats: the Democratic Party's advantage in U.S. House elections

1997

Choice Reviews Online

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Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change

Cited by 314 publications

References 0 publications

Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer or Mobilizer?

Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer or Mobilizer?

The 2014 European Parliament Elections in Southern Europe: Second-Order or Critical Elections?

Cheap seats: the Democratic Party's advantage in U.S. House elections

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