Abstract
We investigate how material and symbolic campaign appeals may motivate segments of the electorate to be more engaged with the unfolding presidential campaign; this engagement is a first step toward bringing these populations into an electoral coalition. We pair two massive new data collections—the National Annenberg Election Study capturing public opinion across an entire campaign and The Wisconsin Advertising Project recording and cataloging the political commercials aired by campaigns—to examine how the candidates’ choice of issues affects who gets into the game. We find evidence that appeals to symbolic interests are more likely than appeals to material interest to selectively engage targeted groups.
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Notes
Leege et al. (2002) contend that Republican presidential candidates have been successful in large part because they have selectively mobilized and demobilized such groups along the cultural issues of the day.
Indeed, Schier (2000) argues that one of the main problems with the current American political setting is that political parties have become too good at such selective mobilization. While Schier provides compelling evidence that political parties are attempting more selective mobilization—what he calls activation—he does not provide evidence of the effects of this activation on citizens.
Schattschneider’s argument that the expansion and contraction of conflict is itself an exercise of power was a response to the pluralist presumption that the decision to (not) participate in politics was either innocuous or solely a function of the civic capacity within the mass public. See Gaventa (1980, chapter 1) for an excellent discussion of the relationship between power and participation.
The data was obtained from a joint project of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and Professor Kenneth Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and includes media tracking data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group in Washington, DC. The Brennan Center—Wisconsin Project was sponsored by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Brennan Center, Professor Goldstein, or The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Clinton and Lapinski (2004) interview several campaign strategists who created ads for the Gore and Bush campaigns in 2000 and these interviews highlight issue choice as a key strategy to mobilize particular demographic groups.
One treatment group saw a positive ad on prescription drugs sponsored by Gore, a second saw a negative ad on prescriptions drugs sponsored by the DNC, and a third saw both ads. Only the first group—those exposed to the single positive ad—evidenced any differential effect.
Here, too, the findings were ambiguous, as a second treatment group exposed to an ad on tax cuts and an ad on government spending found only a weak differential effect by income and a differential effect by age in the direction opposite to the one hypothesized.
Stoker (1994) finds that self reported perceptions of self-interest also motivated behavior.
Government policies and campaign issues are clearly linked. Political actors frequently speak (if not always publicly) about the future tradeoffs between making policy and keeping an issue on the table for future campaigns.
As campaigns become more sophisticated, relying more on targeted mailings and coded language, such appeals may prove more successful.
As a campaign that broke little new ground, the 2000 case offers a more stringent test of the ability of elites to selectively mobilize. Finding effects in such a campaign would strengthen the expectation that we would see a bigger impact of elite issue choice on the composition of the electorate in a campaign that departed more radically from the standard issues (Eckstein 1975; George and Bennett 2005).
The campaign, of course, is not uniform across the country. A handful of battleground states traditionally see most of the presidential campaign action while other states are virtually ignored. The congressional campaigns, for their part, were fought primarily on local issues, providing no overarching themes. The combination of locally-focused congressional races and state-to-state variation in the presidential advertising campaign means citizens living in different geographic areas experienced very different campaign contexts (Goldstein and Freedman 2002b).
Bush’s tax proposal had three major components: a reduction in the marginal tax rates for all tax payers, an elimination of the “marriage penalty,” and an increase in the value of child tax credits. The tax benefit of the eventual cuts went overwhelmingly to the well-off. The tax benefits going to the top 1% of income earners rose from 7.5% in 2001 to 51.8% in 2010 (Bartels 2005, 20).
As a helpful reviewer noted, the immediate value of additional income is higher for low-income groups, meaning the difference between being able to purchase basic goods and services.
The strongest evidence that taxes appeal to material interests comes from a study of the 1978 tax revolt in the form of California’s Prop 13. Homeowners and those experiencing an already high tax burden supported tax revolt whereas public employees opposed it (Sears and Citrin 1982, 114).
Campbell’s research focuses on a unique case—the Reagan administration’s attempt to reduce benefits for current recipients.
In their pioneering study of self-interest versus symbolic politics, Sears and colleagues find that high income whites (especially men) were the strongest proponents of punitive crime policies, but were least likely to be victimized or to feel vulnerable to crime victimization (Sears et al. 1980, 677).
In a recent review of the myriad public opinion polls about education, Hochschild and Scott (1998) find concern about education broadly within the mass public, combined with relative satisfaction with citizens’ own schools.
We base our selection of issues with target groups partially on Clinton and Lapinski’s study of targeted advertising (2004).
We chose to incorporate all of the electoral ads because these comprise the individuals’ full electoral environment, an often noisy and competitive context. All advertising variables are scaled in 1000s of airings.
Respondents not residing in one of the top seventy-five media markets are omitted from our analysis. Unfortunately, this introduces some selection bias, as these markets were less likely to be targeted by the candidates, parties and interest groups airing ads. The resulting truncation of variation in the issue ad measures, though, should serve to weaken the relationships we see in the data.
Interest is assessed with the following questions: “Would you say you have been very much interested, somewhat interested, or not much interested in the presidential campaign so far this year?” and “Would you say you have been very much interested, somewhat interested, or not much interested in the political campaigns so far this year?”.
Senior Citizens are identified as respondents aged 65 or over. Evangelical conservatives are measured as individuals who both identify themselves as “born-again” and as ideologically conservative. High-income respondents are those with family incomes of $75,000 or more.
We use interest in the campaign because it is measurable before the election, but we are relying on the strong relationship between actual participation and campaign interest. Campaign interest and general interest in politics are the consistently strongest predictors of political participation, including voting (see Verba et al. 1995, 358–359, 388–389).
While we cannot ascertain whether individuals actually saw the ads aired in their media markets, we can produce measures of how available the various issue themes were in a surveyed citizen’s geographic and temporal context. Since much campaign information is transmitted via other sources—opinion leaders, social networks, or the mass media—the impact of such advertising does not rest solely on observation of the spots by individuals.
Adding an age-squared term to allow for curvilinear effects did not have any appreciable impact.
In additional analyses, we interacted the advertising emphasis with the other subgroups to examine if groups not thought to be targeted by the message responded differently. For neither taxes nor Social Security and Medicare did the well-off, the elderly, women, women with children, religious conservatives or black Americans respond to greater advertising emphasis with more interest in the campaign.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this point. Though in a myopic sense, tax cuts stand to benefit primarily the well-off—financial returns fall disproportionately to the wealthy and gains to the non-wealthy may be easily offset by reductions in social welfare spending—the public has demonstrated a tendency to respond favorably to tax cuts despite these inequities.
In additional analysis, Democrats appear largely unresponsive to Gore’s tax ads while Republicans became marginally more interested the more Gore’s tax ads aired in their environments.
Clinton and Lapinski’s interviews with Gore strategists indicate that the ads promoting Gore’s tax plan were designed to appeal particularly to lower income men.
Additional analysis reveals that morality-themed ads simultaneously mobilized moderates while demobilizing non-religious conservatives, offering further evidence of counter mobilization. The interest of religious conservatives and liberals was unmoved by a greater morality emphasis.
This result could be a function of selection—that campaign operatives targeted morality ads in areas with less participatory evangelicals. To examine this possibility, we compared the interest among evangelicals during the primaries, when most of these ads had yet to air, in markets that were ultimately heavily targeted with these ads (1000–2600 ads) and in markets that received little to no advertising that contained appeals to morality (0–100 ads). The distribution of interest among evangelical conservatives in the twelve most heavily targeted markets and the fourteen least targeted markets were nearly identical (χ2 = 0.652, p = 0.722), casting doubt on the interpretation of these results as a function of selection effects.
In additional analyses, we interacted advertising attention to crime and to morality issues with the remaining subgroups in our study. Among the well-off, the elderly, women, women with children, religious conservatives, and Black Americans, only the religious conservatives responded differentially to an emphasis on moral issues and only the well-off whites responded to greater emphasis on crime with greater interest in the campaign.
Note the coefficient on the interaction is opposite in sign but approximately equal in magnitude to the coefficient for the baseline effect.
Additional analyses found that no other subgroup in our study—the wealthy, the elderly, religious conservatives, or Black Americans—responded to increased advertising attention to health care or education with greater engagement in the campaign.
If, however, campaigns take advantage of advances in technology to engage in more micro-targeting—directing ads toward specific viewers by airing them on particular programs—consultants and campaign professionals may become increasingly adept at honing and controlling the effects of their issue advertising. While advances in communication technologies provide opportunities to target messages, other new technologies—camera phones, email forwarding, and YouTube—make it harder to keep these messages private by providing opponents with means to spread them well beyond the audience for which they were intended.
Mettler and Stonecash’s study of citizens’ memory of participating in government programs suggests that participation in check-box programs such as the mortgage interest deduction or the Earned Income Tax Credit is quite high, but it is unclear whether these programs provide expressive benefits in addition to the resources they offer. Far fewer report experience with the types of programs that offer unmistakable interaction with government such as TANF, public housing, worker’s compensation, VA benefits, or disability (Mettler and Stonecash 2008).
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Claibourn, M.P., Martin, P.S. Creating Constituencies: Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of Conflict, and Selective Mobilization. Polit Behav 34, 27–56 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9153-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9153-6