Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor explores the dynamic interaction between candidates and voters that takes place during campaigns. It finds that voters respond in a meaningful way to what candidates say and do during their campaigns. Candidates for state-wide and national offices spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours trying to convey their messages to voters. Do voters hear them and respond? More specifically, do the issues candidates stress on the campaign trail influence the choices voters make when casting their ballots? The evidence presented in this book suggests that the answer is a resounding yes. Campaign Dynamics examines more than one hundred gubernatorial elections from 1982 through 1994, beginning with case studies of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey in 1993. Combining interviews and observations with empirical analysis of public opinion polls, the case studies develop the basic understanding of how campaigns define the set of important issues in an election. Then the analysis is expanded to consider the abortion issue in thirty-four gubernatorial elections in 1990. Later chapters test these ideas in over one hundred gubernatorial elections, combining exit poll data on upwards of 100,000 voters from dozens of races with measures of campaign themes developed out of a content analysis of newspaper coverage. This book employs multiple methods and sources of data and represents one of the most comprehensive theoretical and empirical efforts to understand the role of campaigns in voting behavior ever undertaken. Campaign Dynamics will be of interest to those who study state politics, voting behavior and campaigns, and democratic theory. It should also guide students and scholars interested in performing empirical tests of formal models and those wishing to combine multiple methods in their research. Thomas M. Carsey is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Capturing Campaign Dynamics, 2000 and 2004 is ideal for courses in survey research methods in political science, communication studies, and public opinion analysis. It will also be of great interest to pollsters and political consultants.

The Canadian Federal Election of 2006 is a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of the campaign and election that ended the 12-year Liberal reign in Canadian politics and saw the House of Commons shift from one minority government to another. The chapters, composed by leading political writers, commentators, and pollsters, examine the strategies, successes, and blunders of the major players — the Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, Bloc Québécois, and Greens — and also explore the role of the media coverage and the performance and influence of public opinion polls. Special features in this definitive volume explore the way candidates are nominated and the changes in the legislation governing Canadian federal elections. Finally, the book includes a detailed analysis of voting patterns and the rate of voter participation.

The Sourcebook for Political Communication Research will offer scholars, students, researchers, and other interested readers a comprehensive source for state-of-the-art/field research methods, measures, and analytical techniques in the field of political communication. The need for this Sourcebook stems from recent innovations in political communication involving the use of advanced statistical techniques, innovative conceptual frameworks, the rise of digital media as both a means by which to disseminate and study political communication, and methods recently adapted from other disciplines, particularly psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. Chapters will have a social-scientific orientation and will explain new methodologies and measures applicable to questions regarding media, politics, and civic life. The Sourcebook covers the major analytical techniques used in political communication research, including surveys (both original data collections and secondary analyses), experiments, content analysis, discourse analysis (focus groups and textual analysis), network and deliberation analysis, comparative study designs, statistical analysis, and measurement issues.

Focusing on the U.S. 2008 general elections, this study shows the links between inaccurate political ad claims and negativity, sound and visual distortions that influence voter cognition, and voter knowledge and behavior. Knowing less and voting more appears to be the troubling news in an age of post-factual democracies.

Capturing Campaign Effects is the definitive study to date of the influence of campaigns on political culture. Comprising a broad exploration of campaign factors (debates, news coverage, advertising, and polls) and their effects (priming, learning, and persuasion), as well as an impressive survey of techniques for the collection and analysis of campaign data, Capturing Campaign Effects examines different kinds of campaigns in the U.S. and abroad and presents strong evidence for significant campaign effects. "Capturing Campaign Effects is an accessible and penetrating account of modern scholarship on electoral politics. It draws critical insights from a range of innovative analyses." --Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan "What a wonderful way to usher in the new era of election studies! This book spotlights fascinating paradoxes in the literature of voting behavior, highlights many promising approaches to resolving those paradoxes, and shows how these strategies can yield important findings with terrific payoffs for our understanding of contemporary democracy. Fasten your seatbelts, folks: scholarship on elections is about to speed up thanks to this collection of great essays." --Jon Krosnick, Stanford University "The past decade has seen a renewed interest in understanding campaign effects. How and when do voters learn? Does the election campaign even matter at all? Capturing Campaign Effects draws on leading political scientists to address these matters. The result is a collection that will become the major reference for the study of campaigns. The lesson that emerges is that campaigns do affect voter decision making, usually for the better." --Robert S. Erikson, Columbia University Henry E. Brady is Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, and Director of the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Richard Johnston is Professor and Head of Political Science and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.

Online platforms have widened the availability for citizen engagement and opportunities for politicians to interact with their constituents. The increasing use of these technologies has transformed methods of governmental communication in online and offline environments. (R)evolutionizing Political Communications through Social Media offers crucial perspectives on the utilization of online social networks in political discourse and how these alterations have affected previous modes of correspondence. Highlighting key issues through theoretical foundations and pertinent case studies, this book is a pivotal reference source for researchers, professionals, upper-level students, and consultants interested in the influence of emerging technologies in the political arena.

Academic studies of elections are not in the business of predicting outcomes. They are in the business of explaining them. The best studies treat voting data as raw material with which to explore socio-psychological processes such as individual decision-making and such sources of influence as issues, personality, media, socio-economic background, and party loyalty. The ebb and flow of ideologies and the comparative workings of different political systems are core topics on which election studies shed light. Looking back on more than fifty years of voting research, some of its major practitioners and critics reflect here on what has--and has not--been accomplished.

The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are the essential guide to the study of American political life in the 21st Century. With engaging contributions from the major figures in the field The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior provides the key point of reference for anyone working in American Politics today

Every four years Americans are inundated with campaign activities from candidates attempting to become the next president of the United States. An under-researched area of these campaign activities are campaign visits—rallies, town hall meetings, and candidate meet-and-greets for example. Almost all candidates conduct visits, yet we do not have a good understanding of how they affect voters. Wendland tackles four big questions throughout Campaigns That Matter: 1) Do campaigns matter? 2) Are campaign visits strategic? 3) Do visits help mobilize voters? 4) Do visits impact candidate preference? Using a unique set of data that includes all visits conducted throughout the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential nominating contests, Wendland explores how these visits affected voters compared to traditional measures of advertisements, campaign spending, and momentum. In doing so, Wendland has provided us with a more comprehensive picture of how voters make decisions in the voting booth.