Creating Constituencies:
Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of Conflict,
and Selective Mobilization
Michele P. Claibourn
Paul S. Martin
To be published by Political Behavior.
Accepted for publication, November, 2010
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.
Key words: campaign mobilization, political participation, campaign advertising, scope of
conflict
1
“Whoever decides what the game is about decides also who can get into the game.”
(Schattschneider 1960, 102)
On the eve of the 2004 election, Karl Rove, chief strategist for the Bush campaign,
claimed that the key to victory was in turning out the four million evangelicals who did not vote
in 2000 (Kirkpatrick 2007). Indeed, Republicans pursued a multi-pronged strategy to get these
folks to the polls, including traditional voter drives, coordination with evangelical pastors, and
the selection of gay marriage as part of the electoral agenda and the topic of campaign pledges. 1
This example highlights one of the central elements of recent electoral strategy: the selective
activation of core segments of the electorate to build a winning coalition.2
Embedded in Rove’s argument is a claim about power: that political elites, through the
selection of issues, can shape the electorate to their liking. This argument is, perhaps, best
articulated in Schattschneider’s theory of the “scope of conflict.” Schattschneider emphatically
rejected explanations of political participation that attributed “responsibility for widespread
nonparticipation … wholly to the ignorance, indifference and shiftlessness of the people”
(Schattschneider 1960, 102), instead, highlighting the power that rests in the hands of those who
decide the issues and terms of debate.3 Indeed, he called the ability to define the scope of conflict
“the supreme instrument of power” (1960, 66). We revisit this seminal contribution to the study
of power as applied to campaigns.
1
Leege and his colleagues (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.
2
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.
3
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.
2
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 Project4 recording and cataloging the political
commercials aired by campaigns – to examine how the candidates’ choice of issues shapes who
gets into the game.
Campaigns, Mobilization, and Activation
Electoral campaigns, and the increase in citizen attention to politics that accompany
them, offer elites an opportunity to define the scope of political conflict. In the months leading
up to Election Day political actors flood the airwaves with messages structured to elicit
emotional responses, invoke economic interest and otherwise cajole the public into supporting
their candidacies and causes. Some campaign messages are a response to pre-existing concerns
among the public regarding social problems such as economic downturns or limited access to
health care, while other messages are more appropriately understood as “constructed concerns”
used to arouse the mass public (Edelman 1964).
The decision to wage a political campaign on one set of issues versus another is an
attempt to communicate to the mass public not just what, but who the election is about. When
Lyndon Johnson ran on a platform that included civil rights after decades of segregation, the
campaign conveyed to African Americans that they were actively welcomed into the electoral
4
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.
3
coalition (Carmines and Stimson 1989). Similarly, when Karl Rove contended that the 2004
election would be decided by the turnout of evangelicals, he signaled to that group that they are a
critical part of Bush’s electoral team. Examples of campaigns extending such invitations to
participate to select groups abound, yet we have little systematic evidence that these efforts
effectively engage the targeted segments of the electorate.
Low voter turnout is a particular problem in the United States because non-participation
in elections is systematically related to socio-economic status and because advantages accrue to
groups that participate (Martin 2003; Griffin and Newman 2005). If campaigns mobilize or
demobilize the electorate en masse, they have no effect on the larger problem of inequality
within the electorate. If campaigns mobilize selectively, on the other hand, they have an
exceptional capacity to alleviate or exacerbate this inequality.
Research on electoral mobilization has primarily emphasized two mechanisms: party
contact (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Frymer 1999) and campaign tone (Ansolabehere and
Iyengar 1995; Goldstein and Freedman 2002a). While work focusing on campaign tone
presumes mass mobilization, work on direct mobilization via canvassing and voter drives
suggests campaigns do possess the capacity to selectively mobilize (Huckfeldt and Sprague
1992; Wielhouwer and Lockerbie 1994). Nonetheless, we find this approach limited in that it
focuses on the final stage of a longer process of mobilization that begins well before a party
worker makes contact with potential voters on Election Day. It would be a mistake to downplay
the importance of these activities for mobilization, but it is no less a mistake to ignore the
wooing that begins at the onset of the campaign via the campaign issue talk.
In short, we share the sentiment expressed by Schattschneider:
“The fatuous get-out-the-vote movement conducted through the mass media at election
time is a classical instance of the ambivalence of American attitudes toward the problem.
4
… What the sixty million [voters] quarrel about evidently does not excite the forty
million [nonvoters]. In other words, the forty million can be made to participate only in a
new kind of political system based on new cleavages and about something new. It is
impossible to involve the forty million or any major fraction of them short of a largescale change in the agenda of politics” (Schattschneider 1960, 101-102, emphasis in
original).
Parties and campaigns first decide the issues which will define the scope of conflict and then
devise plans to contact potential voters who can be mobilized on those issues. Indeed, candidates
choose issues to highlight as a means of mobilizing certain segments of the population. Studying
party contact while ignoring how the scope of conflict has been defined for a particular campaign
tells us only part of the story.
We emphasize the content of campaign messages in influencing the composition of the
electorate, encouraging some subsets of people to become more engaged while neglecting others
(or disengaging others). Applying Schattschneider’s conception of the scope of conflict to
campaign mobilization offers the opportunity for a richer explanation of political engagement.
By studying how the larger campaign influences individual engagement, we avoid a serious
problem that plagues many studies of citizens – that of isolating the individual citizen from her
context (but see Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995). Studying citizens outside of their contexts is
particularly troublesome for participation research because it allows scholars to overlook how the
political playing field itself – the party system, the campaign agenda, the structure of existing
policy – can make political participation more attractive to people with interests and incentives
already aligned with these structures. Exclusive attention to individual attributes that account for
differences in participation obscures how campaigns and other political structures interact with
those individual attributes.
5
Prior scholarship has not ignored how the choice of issues invites some people into the
political system while escorting others out. Clinton and Lapinski (2004), with the concurrence of
campaign professionals, also suggest that it is the content of advertising messages, not simply the
tone, that influences turnout.5 In a large-scale experiment, they examine whether exposure to a
particular ad, or set of ads, influences intentions to vote differentially for subjects who are part of
the group being targeted by the ad compared to others. They use actual campaign ads produced
and aired by the competing presidential candidates in 2000; the group targeted by each ad was
identified by campaign consultants during interviews. Clinton and Lapinski find ambiguous
support for the ability of campaigns to selectively mobilize. In particular, they find that exposure
to an ad promoting prescription drug benefits had a differential impact on women and the elderly
in only one of the three relevant treatment groups.6 Further, exposure to two ads – one focusing
on education and one on economic issues – influenced intention to vote differentially by
income.7
Sides and Karch (2008), relying on turnout data from the Current Population Study and
detailed advertising content in the 1998, 2000 and 2002 campaigns, explicitly test whether three
“issue publics” became more participatory when the campaigns focus on the issues that
materially benefit them. Their study examined whether Senior Citizens, veterans, and parents
became more likely to vote in places where campaigns emphasized, respectively, Social Security
and Medicare, veteran’s benefits, and education and childcare. Only with the case of parents
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
6
residing in media markets that received a heavy dose of advertising on education and childcare
do they find empirical support for the hypothesis that campaign appeals can mobilize particular
subsets of voters. They suggest, in response, that selective mobilization is more likely under two
conditions: the targeted group is not already highly participatory and the amount of advertising
on the mobilizing issue is substantial. While the Sides and Karch study is an important step in the
right direction, it is limited in its choice of mechanisms. In fact, their findings are consistent with
a body of evidence in the political behavior literature showing that narrowly-defined self-interest
rarely motivates citizen behavior (see Sears and Funk 1990 for a review). Moreover, their
research points to the limits of certain types of policies, namely those involving transfers of
benefits, from selectively engaging the public.
Appeals to Symbolic and Material Interests
The preponderance of evidence about citizen decision-making and behavior suggests that
citizens respond to a mixture of symbols and material interests, with most issue appeals
combining the two. Citizens are responsive to symbols, including partisanship (Campbell et al.
1960), perceived threats to values (Sears, Hensler, and Speer 1979; Campbell 2006), and a
broader sense of the common good (Kinder and Kiewiet 1981). Indeed, Edelman (1964) argues
that political elites recognize the mass public’s susceptibility to the manipulation of symbols and
play on the public’s hopes and fears for their own political gain.
Further complicating matters, what constitutes material self-interest is not always straight
forward. The debate over extending the estate tax in 2004 provides a vivid illustration. Support
for eliminating the tax was strong within the mass public both because citizens misperceived
their income level – thinking they were in a higher income percentile than they were and
7
plausibly subject to the tax – and because of an optimistic belief that one day they too would be
in the top income categories eligible for the tax (Bartels 2008, 198-205). The degree to which
one would call opposition to the estate tax self-interest depended on expectations for the future.8
While some issues could clearly target self-interest narrowly defined – subjecting a
particular population to a particular gain or loss, for example eminent domain or land
redistribution – the ambiguity of elite messages and broad-based ignorance of the policy effects
of legislation transform even the clearest case of objective, material self-interest into an issue
that appears more symbolic, or encourages myopic self-interest at the expense of longer-term
consequences.
Scholars in the policy feedback literature have done much of the heavy lifting to connect
elite decision-making with citizen behavior (Mettler and Soss 2004). Drawing from the policyfeedback work demonstrating how citizen experiences with policy and the policy-making
process shape incentives (Campbell 2003) and construct citizens (Soss 1999; Mettler 2002;
Schneider and Ingram 1993), we contend that political campaigns serve as a related
communicative forum for shaping citizens.9 Each campaign message is a potential advertisement
of existing or potential government programs (“Health care for every American”), a validation of
social concerns (“It’s the economy, stupid!”), a notice that relationships with existing state
clients will be severed (“End welfare as we know it”), or an opportunity to highlight threats to
values (“Restore moral integrity to the White House and the nation”) and identity (“Securing the
Borders”). In short, these expressive components of campaigns tie citizens to politics in ways
similar to those suggested by the policy feedback literature – they define membership in political
communities by identifying in-groups and out-groups, they identify threats to those groups, they
8
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.
9
8
provide information that makes material incentives clearer for targeted groups, and they affirm
the concerns and demands of some types of citizens as legitimate goals of government.
While campaigns can do many of the things suggested by the policy feedback literature –
evoke identity, clarify (or muddle) material interest, and identify value threats – we argue that
campaign communications are more likely to selectively mobilize in response to two conditions:
when messages are aimed at a less ideologically-defined group and when messages highlight the
symbolic, rather than material, appeal of the issue.
First, mobilization of ideological groups always risks stimulating counter mobilization.
This loss of control is the key hazard inherent in widening the scope of conflict. Counter
mobilization is most likely when appeals are made to groups with identifiable opponents, such
that identification of specific winners necessarily identifies specific losers. Groups based on
ideology are more likely to be defined in zero-sum, us-versus-them terms. So appeals to abortion
foes generally activate proponents of choice, while appeals to women are less likely to activate
men. Though it is possible to quietly activate an ideological group, modern campaigns, which
rely heavily on free media reports of public events and which allocate the largest share of
expenditures for television advertising, are an unlikely vehicle for such quiet activation.10
Second, research finding only limited influence of self-interest on political attitudes and
behavior indicates a potential problem in selectively mobilizing groups around transfers of
benefits. Only under fairly stringent conditions – benefits are large, tangible and certain (Citrin
and Green 1990) – do issues evoke citizens’ long-run objective material interests. Citizen
misunderstanding of policies in response to elite obfuscation or their own willful delusions about
future prospects may also lead the appeals aimed at narrow groups to be embraced more widely
10
As campaigns become more sophisticated, relying more on targeted mailings and coded language, such appeals
may prove more successful.
9
out of myopic self-interest (Bartels 2005). If a benefit is truly selectively offered and is clearly
understood as such, politicians also risk counter mobilization from the losing groups.
Instead, what citizens more commonly respond to are the symbols embedded in the issues
(Sears and Funk 1990), the interpretive messages conveyed by the issues (Pierson 1993; Mettler
2002). When leaders highlight issues aimed at particular groups – be they evangelicals, women
with children, racially resentful whites – they signal to members that they are valued citizens
with a voice in government. These subtler appeals – to identity, to values – may prove more
fruitful in selectively engaging the relevant publics in the political arena.
Joining these conditions suggests campaigns will selectively mobilize most successfully
when making more symbolic appeals to non-ideological groups with no clearly organized
opposition: soccer moms, the elderly, and those with higher income. While all issues arguably
contain both symbolic and material appeals (Edelman 1964), we maintain that issues can be
reasonably arrayed along a continuum from those appealing principally to material interests
(involving a clear transfer of benefits) to those appealing principally to symbolic interests.
Creating Constituencies in the 2000 Campaign
As an initial foray into understanding how the issue agenda may selectively engage
constituents we consider the 2000 electoral campaign context. While the 2000 presidential
election will be remembered as one of the more peculiar electoral decisions in U.S. history, the
campaign itself was not especially remarkable. In the accounts of some media reports, it was not
even especially interesting, breaking little new substantive ground. Indeed, observers have noted
that both candidates at the head of their parties’ tickets spent a lot of time appealing to the center
using a similar set of issues – education, health care, Social Security, and taxes. The economy as
10
an issue was notable for its absence, but otherwise the top-of-the-ticket campaign provided few
surprises. From the perspective offered by Schattschneider, the 2000 case may be a tough one for
observing any impact of targeted issue appeals.11
The content of the 2000 advertising campaigns generally confirms the conventional
wisdom regarding the election. Figure 1 lists the major campaign themes as seen through all of
the political ads aired in the top seventy-five media markets in the year leading up to Election
Day (Goldstein, Franz, and Ridout 2002).12 The table indicates all issues mentioned in more than
10 percent of the ad airings. Social Security and Medicare, education, health care, and taxes were
clearly the most prominent during this campaign.
In the following analysis, then, we begin with these four sets of issues, along with two of
the less prominent themes believed to be targeted toward more specific populations: issues of
crime (5% of ads) and morality (4%). Including issues emphasized prominently as well as issues
targeted more narrowly allows us to examine whether the pervasiveness of a campaign theme
impacts the selectivity of its influence.
Our primary interest is in whether emphasizing particular campaign themes alters the
composition of the engaged citizenry. While some of these themes might be thought to promote
citizen interest broadly, candidates, at least, often believe their emphasis on one of these issues is
most likely to appeal to specific groups of potential voters (Clinton and Lapinski 2004). Below
11
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).
12
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).
11
we explain where each of the issues we analyze falls in the continuum from symbolic to material
interest and which sub-populations are likely to be targeted by the issue.
Tax cuts were a central issue for the 2000 Bush campaign, highlighted as the first plank
in the Republican Party platform. Bush advertised his tax cuts as expansive – “anyone who pays
taxes gets a tax cut” – however, the impact of the tax cuts would not be evenly distributed.13 The
proposed cuts were proportional to tax payments, meaning wealthier tax payers would reap a
comparatively large benefit in real dollars by reducing the marginal tax on the highest earners,
though the personal value of the tax cuts could be proportionally higher for those with lower
incomes.14 Bush also championed the elimination of the estate tax, which would only impact
those with over $3 million in assets.
Gore offered a more modest set of tax breaks, mostly targeted to middle and lower
income groups, including expanding the earned income tax credit and child care tax credits.
Critics saw Gore’s proposed tax cuts as confusing; New York Times columnist Paul Krugman
opined, “It is an understatement to say that the tax breaks are complicated. As best I can figure,
they are targeted on a middle-income widow with many children, all about to enter college, who
does not receive health insurance from her employer, is enrolled in a training program, drives a
fuel-efficient car and is about to inherit a farm” (2000).
In this campaign environment, material interest might work in multiple ways. With a
sophisticated understanding of how the tax policies would play out, material interest would
disproportionately lead wealthier individuals to engage in the campaign based on Bush’s
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).
14
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.
13
12
advertising, as modest tax cuts for those in lower incomes may be offset with a reduction in
government services to those same groups. On the other hand, a short-run, myopic material
interest would promote engagement across the board, as there was something for everyone in the
Bush tax proposals. Gore’s more selective tax emphasis, though, should engage the material
interest only of those with modest or lower incomes, since his proposed cuts were targeted at
these groups. In contrast to Bush’s tax focus, there’s little reason to expect Gore’s advertising
emphasis on taxes to produce generalized interest as a function of material interest.
The tests we construct allow us to examine whether those with higher incomes respond at
a higher rate to an emphasis on taxes, indicating a more sophisticated sense of material interest,
or whether the emphasis on tax cuts had a broader appeal. Past scholarship identifies taxes as one
of the rare issues for which self-interest explains much about policy attitudes (Sears and Funk
1990). The impact of tax changes, particularly on the well-off, are sometimes large, usually
tangible, and generally certain.15
Competing proposals to reform Social Security and Medicare serve as a second example
of possibly self-interested appeals centered on a transfer of benefits. Bush proposed to move part
of Social Security into personal retirement savings accounts to take advantage of gains offered
by the stock market whereas Gore argued for keeping Social Security safe from the risks of the
market and using the budget surplus to bolster the Social Security Trust Fund. The Bush
proposals specified that changes to Social Security would not affect current recipients or those
close to receiving benefits, though the Gore campaign worked to frame the debate as the
provision of stronger safeguards (by Gore) versus the introduction of greater risks (by Bush).
15
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).
13
Both campaigns offered proposals to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, though
there were differences about how such a program would be run and whether it would provide
universal benefits. If the Social Security debate centered on the potential loss of benefits, the
prescription drug debate was a matter of potential gain for the target population. As with tax
cuts, however, the operation of material interest is not straight-forward: Social Security and
Medicare are universal programs that will affect all citizens, though changes to those programs
will affect some more than others and some more immediately than others. Additions of a
prescription drug benefit will immediately benefit current seniors, but would presumably
continue to offer benefits to subsequent generations as they age into the system. Depending on
whether people are sophisticated or myopic, all voters could be activated by these issues.
We test whether Senior Citizens respond differentially to an increasing emphasis on
Social Security and Medicare. Unquestionably, seniors have the most to gain or lose in the shortterm with changes in Social Security or Medicare, though because this is a transfer program from
the young to the old, everyone stands to either gain or lose by a change to this system. Further,
Campbell (2003) provides evidence that this is an issue for which self-interest predicts not just
attitudes, but participatory behavior.16
At the other end of the spectrum, we explore how an increasing campaign emphasis on
morality (abortion, gay marriage, and morality more generally) impacts evangelical
conservatives. These issues have the capacity to both define ideological groups and identify
threats to those groups in symbolic terms. Scholars note that the contemporary evangelical
conservative movement defines itself as being in contest with secular forces: “Evangelicals’
sense of cultural embattlement is likely exacerbated by what they perceive as a popular culture
Campbell’s research focuses on a unique case – the Reagan administration’s attempt to reduce benefits for current
recipients.
16
14
…that rejects their values” (Campbell 2006, 106). Campaign appeals to morality issues serve to
highlight the threat from secular forces, a threat not to material interests but to values and
identity. And evangelical conservatives appear mobilizable on the basis of these value threats;
for example, evangelicals are more likely to vote Republican when their communities include
more secularists (Campbell 2006).
The second symbolic issue we consider is crime. While crime policy could appeal to selfinterest (including a transfer of security benefits through the building of prisons or the hiring of
more police), students of public policy see crime policy as a reordering of values rather than
income (Meier 1994; Morone 2004). In assessing the literature on crime policy, Weaver argues
that “[t]he overarching theme in these accounts is that crime is a symbol for other societal
anxieties” closely connected to race (Weaver 2007, 232). Scholarship in political behavior
broadly supports the assessment of crime as a symbolic issue. The preponderance of evidence
suggests that attitudes toward crime policy are related neither to experience with crime nor to the
probability of criminal victimization (Unnever, Cullen, and Fisher 2007; Sears et al. 1980).
Instead, research underscores how the issue of crime is intimately connected to race and racial
attitudes. Both news and campaign ads about crime have been found to heighten racial attitudes
in political judgments (Valentino 1999; Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002; Mendelberg
1997). And strategic politicians use the subtle and not so subtle racial overtones of crime to
appeal to white voters (Mendelberg 2001). Thus, emphasizing crime as a campaign issue serves
to reinforce the threat of the “other,” highlighting challenges to values by defining deviance.
While crime as a campaign issue may be designed to appeal broadly to white voters, we focus
15
our test on high income white voters as they are least likely to experience criminal victimization;
their responses, then, represent the impact of symbolic politics more cleanly.17
Many, if not most, issues blur the line between transfers of benefits and symbolic politics.
We examine how women (with and without children in the home) respond to ads mentioning
education and health care as two such cases. In the case of both education and health care,
mothers may have a self-interested stake in policy outcomes as they may see themselves as
bearing primary responsibility for these domains within their own households. Nevertheless,
much of the policy discourse centers on problems that are not facing most of the largely middle
class electorate – a lack of health insurance and poorly performing schools.18 Subsequently, the
power of appeals about health care and education can be seen as acting on a shared
understanding and sympathy for those facing problems with health care and education.19 We pair
the more targeted test of women with children in the home with a test of women in general as the
broader targeted group as a way to contrast the appeal of education and health care as triggers for
material versus symbolic interest.
Sears and colleagues (1980) found mixed evidence that both symbolic politics and selfinterest govern attitudes toward national health insurance. Those without insurance and those
believing their insurance costs were too high supported national health insurance along with
Democrats and liberals (Sears et al 1980, 673-4). Of the four issues that they examined (crime,
bussing, health insurance, and unemployment), attitudes toward health insurance offered the
most mixed results between self-interest and symbolic politics, though symbolic politics still
17
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).
18
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.
19
We base our selection of issues with target groups partially on Clinton and Lapinski’s study of targeted
advertising (2004).
16
accounted for four times more variance than self-interest. Education similarly shows hints of
self-interest with a broader element of symbolic politics. In studying the 1978 California tax
revolt, Sears and Citrin found that support for public school funding was in part influenced by
having children in the school system, but that symbolic politics – ideology, attitudes about race,
and party identification – again accounted for four times the variance of self-interest (1982, 173).
That we may conceive of an issue as an appeal to material interest, of course, does not
mean that the mass public will comply with that understanding of an issue or respond to it
accordingly.
Design and Methods
To examine the influence of the campaign emphasis on the engagement of targeted
populations we combine survey data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey
(NAES) with campaign advertising data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project (WiscAds). The
NAES, the largest academic election survey conducted up to that point with about 100,000
interviews, was administered as a rolling cross-section beginning in January 2000 through
Election Day (Romer et al. 2004). This design affords us the opportunity to incorporate both
variation over time, as the campaign progresses, and over space, as respondents inhabit differing
campaign environments. Thus we can examine engagement as a function of both time, using the
date of interview as a random variable, and issue emphasis via the campaign ads within a
citizen’s media market.
We rely on the campaign advertising to describe individuals’ campaign environments,
noting, of course, that the ads themselves constitute only a part of the campaign. Ads, however,
are a part of the campaign that varies across individuals as a function of candidate strategy rather
17
than as a function of respondent characteristics, unlike, for instance, the presidential debates.
Further, they are a measurable part of the campaign – particularly with the arrival of data from
the Campaign Media Analysis Group and the coding and release of this data by the Wisconsin
Advertising Project (Goldstein, Franz, and Ridout 2002). The WiscAds data records when a
campaign ad was aired, in what market it was aired, and the content of the ad for the top seventyfive media markets, allowing us to capture the frequency of issue emphasis within a particular
respondent’s media market at a particular point in time.
For each of the issue themes we examine – morality, education, health care, Social
Security and Medicare, crime, and taxes – we create a measure of how many ads mentioning the
issue have been aired by any source in a particular media market through a particular day. 20
Thus, the measure accumulates as the campaign progresses, reflecting our belief that it is not just
the recently aired ads that compose the campaign environment and thereby shape citizen interest
(Claibourn 2008). These issue advertising measures are combined with the NAES data, giving us
a measure of how many ads mentioning each issue have been aired in a respondent’s area up to
the date of her interview.21
Using the survey data combined with the measure of issue advertising emphasis we
model individuals’ levels of expressed interest in the campaign as a function of the cumulative
advertising emphasis on an issue, an indicator for membership in the targeted subgroup, and the
interaction between these measures.22 Recall the groups we focus on are women with children,
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.
21
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.
22
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?”
20
18
women in general, Senior Citizens, evangelical conservatives, and those with higher incomes. 23
As campaign interest, our operationalization of engagement, is ordinal, we estimate a series of
ordered probit models.24
The indicator for subgroup membership captures whether members of the subgroup are,
on average, more or less interested than the rest of the population, conditional on living in areas
that receive no campaign advertising on the issue at hand. The cumulative advertising emphasis
on an issue provides a sense of whether attention to the issue increased interest in the campaign
in general, across the remaining population. And the coefficient on the interaction between issue
attention and the subgroup tells us whether the subgroup became more engaged in the campaign
in response to the issue attention relative to the rest of the population. If issue attention, as
conveyed through campaign advertising, selectively engages constituents, we should see it in the
coefficients on these interactions – targeted subgroups should become relatively more interested
in response to the advertising resulting in significantly positive coefficients.25
In addition, we control for how long the campaign has been going on, using a counter for
the number of days since the beginning of the election year and an indicator for whether the
respondent is interviewed during the primaries or the general campaign, as we expect interest to
rise as Election Day approaches and to increase between the primary and general campaigns in a
nonlinear fashion. We control, as well, for the total number of campaign ads aired in the area up
23
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.
24
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, Schlozman, and
Brady 1995, 358-359, 388-389).
25
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
19
to that point to better distinguish between the influence of the quantity and content of campaign
advertising. Finally, we control for a variety of demographic characteristics known to impact
political engagement – age, gender, race, ethnicity, education and strength of partisanship.
The effect of a particular issue emphasis on a targeted subgroup is estimated separately
for each group-issue combination. The measures of cumulative issue emphasis, total number of
ads, and progression of the campaign are already inherently correlated. Including multiple
cumulative issue emphasis measures simultaneously introduces even greater collinearity into the
estimation and we have elected to keep the results clearer by examining the effects separately.
Finally, because individuals are nested within media markets and, so, share a similar context, we
estimate clustered standard errors, clustered by media market, to account for the additional
dependence induced by the common environment.
Results
Material Appeals
Table 1 presents the results for the issues most readily characterized as appeals to
material interest, taxes and Social Security, where policy differentially effects discrete
populations based on income and age.
Here, as in all subsequent analyses, the approach of Election Day increases campaign
interest, and the general election period produces a bump in interest over the primary period
above and beyond the increase associated with the progression of the campaign. Older
respondents express more interest in the campaign,26 and women express less interest, on
average. Greater education is consistently associated with greater political interest; and
26
Adding an age-squared term to allow for curvilinear effects did not have any appreciable impact.
20
respondents with stronger attachments to parties always express greater interest in the ongoing
campaign.
The left columns of Table 1 present the effects of tax emphasis. Contrary to conventional
wisdom, ads about taxes encouraged interest across all income groups, as indicated by the
positive and significant coefficient on cumulative tax ads. Further, campaign attention to taxes
had no differential effect on higher income respondents, as indicated by the null result on the
interaction between tax ads and the indicator of those with higher incomes. Figure 2, using the
estimates from Table 1, presents the predicted probability that the wealthy and others are very
interested in the campaign as an emphasis on taxes increases in a respondent’s campaign
environment and reiterates the relatively universal effect of attention to taxes on increasing
citizen engagement; while the probability of very high interest increases by about .15 among the
wealthy as tax emphasis increases from its minimum to its maximum, the increase among the
rest of the population is about .16.27 Indeed, the modest advantage in engagement enjoyed by the
rich evaporated as tax talk intensified in a citizen’s campaign environment.
This set of findings is consistent with Bartels’s findings that individual’s perceptions of
their own tax burden – rather than a sense of the overall implications of the tax policies – drove
public opinion toward tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. His explanation fits here: ads on tax cuts
engaged people by appealing to “simple-minded and sometimes misguided considerations of
self-interest” (Bartels 2005, 21). While Democrats described these cuts as being in the narrowself interest of wealthier Americans who would receive the lion’s share of the tax break in terms
of raw dollars, Republicans described the tax cuts as in everyone’s material interest – everyone
has more discretionary income and the economy would receive a stimulus.
27
The predicted probabilities were generated via simulation using Clarify (Tomz, Wittenberg, and King 2001; King,
Tomz, and Wittenberg 2000). The value of control variables were held constant at their means or modes.
21
The middle columns of Table 1 display the results of advertising attention to Social
Security and Medicare. An increasing emphasis on these issues stimulates greater interest among
respondents generally, compared to respondents whose campaign environments provide less
attention to Social Security and Medicare. However, the impact of this issue attention among
Senior Citizens does not differ from the rest of the population.28 The broadly engaging effect of
Social Security and Medicare emphasis appears clearly in Figure 3. The probability of being very
interested in the campaign increased in similar ways for the elderly and others; with modest
attention to the issue in the advertising within a market, any gap in interest between the elderly
and the rest of the population is rendered insignificant.
While ads highlighting taxes and Social Security/Medicare mobilized, they did so more
broadly. These two findings are consistent with those of Sides and Karch (2008): material
interest, narrowly defined, is a poor mechanism for mobilization. On one hand, this may fit well
into a longer tradition of research that suggests that people are, in fact, not strongly motivated by
self-interest when it comes to political choices or involvement. It may also say something about
the issues of taxes and Social Security themselves. Social Security, like taxes, can be conceived
as universally salient, if not equally so. Tax cuts could benefit all citizens who pay taxes;
changes in Social Security stand to affect everyone by changing the nature of the generational
transfer.29 In this reading, material interest is being engaged, but not selectively. At a minimum,
these results suggest that campaigners cannot readily peel off particular segments of the
28
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.
29
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.
22
population with these sorts of messages, even if they are presumed to be especially salient to
those segments.
The problem with “self-interest” as a mechanism for selective engagement is either that it
doesn’t work well enough to move the targeted group or that it works too well – moving both the
targeted group and everyone else. Either way, appeals to material interest through a transfer of
benefits show no evidence of selective mobilization.
Material Appeals through Selective Benefit Transfers
Few issues in the campaign were intentionally framed by the campaign as benefiting
select populations. Changes to Medicare and Social Security have clear current recipients, but all
citizens are eligible for the programs; Bush’s tax plans, while contested by the Gore campaign,
offered something to everyone. Gore’s tax plan is the exception: the tax benefits would only go
to those of lower and middle income, offering a rare chance to examine how the citizenry
responds to proposed benefits targeted at specific groups.
The rightmost columns of Table 1 present the estimates from a model of interest as a
function of tax emphasis by Gore’s campaign only. While the Gore tax plan was targeted toward
lower income voters, we find evidence that this emphasis backfired. Everyone became
marginally more interested in the campaign where Gore’s tax ads aired with greater frequency,
but those with higher incomes responded considerably more strongly than those with less
income; the coefficient on the interaction between high income and Gore’s tax ads is positive
and significant. Figure 4 illustrates how an increasing emphasis on taxes by the Gore campaign
in a media market increases the interest gap among the rich and middle- and lower-class
23
respondents.30 Undoubtedly, the Gore campaign did not intend to selectively mobilize the
economically better off with a tax plan targeted at people with lower incomes.31
Symbolic Appeals
We test the effects of more expressly symbolic appeals in Table 2. The first appeal is
targeted at an ideological community (evangelical conservatives) and the second to a nonideological group (the rich). The effect of morality ads on born-again conservatives is not,
perhaps, what political operatives might have predicted (see Table 2, left columns). Those selfdescribed as being born-again and ideologically conservative are more interested in the campaign
compared to the rest of the population. And greater attention to morality in one’s media market
increased campaign interest across the board. Nevertheless, this effect is negated for born-again
conservatives. The interactive effect, though only marginally significant, is larger in magnitude
than the baseline effect of ad emphasis on morality issues. Thus, born-again conservatives appear
to become comparatively less interested in the campaign as attention to morality issues increases.
Figure 5 displays this dynamic. While more attention to issues of morality in a respondent’s
campaign environment stimulates interest in the campaign in general, there is no significant
effect on religious conservatives; the predicted probability of very high interest declines by .03
as morality talk varies from its low to high values. Among the remaining respondents, the
predicted probability of very high interest increases by .08. While religious conservatives
initially expressed more interest in the campaign, in the absence of morality ads, this advantage
is quickly eliminated with even a little attention to the issue. Morality ads may have also fostered
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.
31
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.
30
24
a backlash among the likely targets of the ads and stimulated the interest of non-targeted
groups.32
The effects of morality ads on evangelical conservatives are at odds with popular
explanations for the 2000 (and 2004) election, but they conform to our expectation that position
issues more readily draw counter-mobilization. Keeping in mind that evangelical conservatives
are already more engaged than the average citizen, it appears that the morality ads stirred
passions on both sides of this political fight and inadvertently drew more heavily on those in
support of gay rights and abortion rights.33
In contrast to the failure of an emphasis on morality to selectively mobilize evangelical
conservatives, crime ads do appear to selectively mobilize the well-off (right column of Table 2).
As expected, the rich start with a clear advantage in political interest and an emphasis on crime
in the advertising campaign within their electoral contexts enhances that interest. Crime
emphasis in the advertising campaign, though, does not appear to have a discernible effect on the
remaining population.34 Figure 6 highlights this pattern, with the probability of high interest
among the rich increasing by .28 as crime emphasis increases from zero to its maximum,
compared to an analogous increase of .06 among the rest of the sample; the gap in interest
32
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.
33
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 to 2600 ads) and in markets that received little to no advertising that contained appeals to morality (0 to 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=.722), casting doubt on the interpretation of
these results as a function of selection effects.
34
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.
25
between the rich and non-rich increases as the campaign environment attends more heavily to
crime-related issues.
For both of these more symbolic issues we see a differential impact on subpopulations,
though not always in the direction intended by the campaigns. It is worth noting that we find
these selective effects for the issues that are not prominently emphasized in campaigns
nationwide and for subgroups that are already highly engaged. Furthermore, perhaps not
coincidentally, the issue that appears most effective at selectively engaging a group is one
teeming with racial implications.
Mixed Appeals
Most issues blur the distinction between material and symbolic appeals. Education and
health care typify this duality. To tease out evidence of material interest and symbolic politics
driving engagement in response to the campaign message we look at two target populations:
first, we consider women with children as the population most materially effected by education
and health care for evidence of self-interest driving campaign engagement (Table 3); second, we
examine women in general for evidence that these issues increase engagement based on more
symbolic appeals (Table 4).
Beginning with the left columns of Table 3, women with children living at home are less
engaged in the campaign than others, on average. A greater number of campaign ads mentioning
education within an individual’s campaign environment generally increases campaign interest, as
evidenced by the positive and significant coefficient for cumulative education ads. And while
mothers respond a bit more strongly to this campaign ad emphasis, the coefficient for the
interaction between the two indicators is not significant. Nevertheless, the gap in interest among
26
mothers absent any attention to education is closed as education talk increases, as can be seen
more readily in Figure 7.
The story for health care, relayed in the right-most columns of Table 3, is a little
different. There is a marginally differential effect of advertising emphasis on health care in one’s
environment on campaign interest among women with children and the rest of the population. In
this case, the issue attention appears to decrease campaign interest overall, though the coefficient
for health care emphasis is not significant; among women with children, however, the impact of
such issue attention is marginally significant and positive.35 While attention to health care does
not appear to stimulate substantially greater interest among women with children, this
differential effect still suggests changes in the composition of interest in the electorate favoring
mothers. Figure 8 presents the predicted probabilities of being very interested in the campaign as
a function of health care talk, depicting the reduction in differential interest among mothers and
others as health care emphasis increases. As evidence for material self-interest, these effects are
in the right direction, but fail a standard test of statistical significance.
When we widen the lens to look at the effects on women more generally, rather than
mothers, we see more compelling evidence of selective mobilization (Table 4). Whereas
exposure to more campaign ads about education and health care appeared to close the gap
between women with children and the rest of the population, exposure to those same ads more
clearly increases campaign engagement by women relative to men. Men, it appears, are generally
unresponsive to the emphasis on education in the campaign ads based on the statistically
insignificant coefficient on education ads (left column). The generalized increase in engagement
in response to education ads found in Table 3 appears to be primarily the result of the increased
35
Note the coefficient on the interaction is opposite in sign but approximately equal in magnitude to the coefficient
for the baseline effect.
27
interest among women. The predicted probabilities of high interest shown in Figure 9 clearly
illustrate that greater attention to education in the campaign closes the initial gap in interest
among men and women.
Attention to health care (right column) significantly reduces interest in the campaign
among men, but the effect for women is neutral, as evidenced by the coefficient on the
interaction between women and health care ads. The effect, as with education, is to extinguish
the difference in interest between men and women (Figure 10).36
We see the starker effects of education and health care on women in general, compared to
women with children, as evidence that these issues were more compelling as symbols than as
triggers for material interests.
Issue Appeals and Campaign Tone
Campaign tone, whether ads are negative, positive or comparative, has been analyzed as a
key conduit of a campaign’s ability to mobilize. As a check on these results, we re-estimated
each model separating out positive issue appeals, negative issue appeals and comparative issue
appeals. The results distinguishing appeals by tone were usually the same as the results using all
ads. If a coefficient’s sign was positive (or negative) using all ads, it was positive (or negative)
using positive or negative or comparative ads only; if a coefficient was significant (or nonsignificant) using all ads, it was significant (or non-significant) using positive or negative or
comparative ads only. Importantly, as this implies, the results for positive or negative or
comparative ads only were essentially identical to one another.
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.
36
28
One modest exception occurred for the impact of morality ads. When all morality ads are
used, the effect of an emphasis on morality emphasis among the broader electorate is positive
and significant; among religious conservatives, the effect of morality emphasis is negative and
significant (Table 2). The effect on the general electorate remains positive and significant using
only positive ads, but is only marginally significant when only negative or comparative ads are
used. Similarly, among religious conservatives, the negative impact is significant when only
positive ads are used, but not when only negative or comparative ads are included. Only for
morality ads does tone appear to alter the results. And, for morality ads, positive ads appear more
effective.
Discussion and Conclusion
Before considering the meaning of our results, we must first note that our analyses are
necessarily limited to the campaign that occurred rather than the alternative campaigns
politicians chose not to run. The 2000 campaign does not denote a new discussion, but a small
punctuation on traditional American political discourse. As such, our analysis can offer a sense
of how a typical American political campaign can shape the electorate. Because the range of
issues considered in the typical election is relatively narrow, reflecting a two-party system (we
have no Le Pen arguing for racial orders, no Communist Party pushing for greater state
involvement, and no sizable post-material party), we cannot say how other types of issues might
stimulate those who are historically less involved in politics. We have little opportunity to
observe how campaigns targeting the poor, the young, and the less educated would affect those
populations.
29
Further, as the 2000 campaign did not part company with traditional politics in the United
States, we are examining the effect of exposure to messages akin to those the population has
been habitually exposed to over many campaigns. Consequently, citizens may already have
developed long-term, well-grounded responses to these issues that are reflected in their baseline
levels of political interest. In other words, the standing demographic differences in political
interest may be less about civic skills and more about individuals’ understandings, developed
through a lifetime of observing the American political system, of what politics is about.
In short, because the 2000 campaign brought very little major change in the scope of
conflict, this particular election is simultaneously a poor test of Schattschneider’s larger idea of
how the scope of conflict drives who participates and a good test of how a normal campaign, by
reinforcing the existing scope of conflict, may continue to fine tune who gets into the game.
Empirically studying campaign effects is a thorny business. Scholars may disagree about
how best to measure the campaign, but few contend that doing so is easy. We choose to look at
television advertising, knowing that ads are just one part of the multilayered enterprise of the
modern campaign. Even with more precise measurements of when and where campaign
advertisements air, it is exceptionally difficult to isolate campaign influences (Zaller 2002).
There are undoubtedly different ways to study the question we have engaged.
These considerations should frame our results: we have a narrow range of issues to work
with, variation in exposure to traditional campaign messages is limited, and campaign effects are
difficult to uncover. Even so, the results from our analyses collectively tell an interesting story
about both the potential for issue ads to reshape the electorate and the difficulty in doing so with
any level of precision. The effects documented in this paper suggest the greater power of
symbolic politics to selectively mobilize – with crime selectively engaging wealthier respondents
30
and education differentially engaging women – whether or not those appeals are prominent
campaign themes. We saw no evidence of selective engagement stemming from the collective
campaign attention to taxes or Social Security, though that may indicate a more myopic sense of
material interest at play, at least with respect to taxes. That Gore’s tax ads differentially
mobilized the wealthy and that morality ads comparatively demobilized religious conservatives
speaks to the risk of issue appeals framed in more explicitly us-versus-them terms.
Rather than reading our analyses as evidence that political elites can target populations
with laser-guided proficiency, we see evidence that specific populations are affected by
particular issue campaigns, but not with the level of control that has been implied in the press or
by self-serving campaign consultants. Technological innovations, changes in party strategies,
and the development of campaign experts suggest that political elites are actively trying to carve
out niche populations. These results remind us to distinguish between elite attempts or claims at
selective mobilization and elite success in doing so. Scholarly concern about excessive elite
control (e.g., Schier 2000) may, therefore, be premature.37
While not always effective, selective mobilization occurred in two of our six tests, and
with issues that are heavily symbolic and targeted toward a non-ideological group. One concern
we began with was the ability of strategic elites to exacerbate existing inequalities in the
American electorate. On this, the results are mixed. An emphasis on crime pushed an already
advantaged group to be more engaged whereas an emphasis on education brought a less engaged
group into to 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.
37
31
Finally, our results provide a first step toward bridging work on the expressive
components of policy and campaigns. Scholars studying policy feedback have wisely begun to
examine how experiences with government programs influence citizens’ conceptions of and
responses to government and politics. American campaigns provide another avenue for shaping
these responses. Every four years we are exposed to a lengthy spectacle of political elites vying
for our support, telling us who we are as Americans, defining the problems we collectively face,
and offering their ideas about who in society is deserving of either positive or negative
government attention. The exceptional length of the American presidential campaign, combined
with the relatively small welfare state, suggests that compared to citizens of other democracies,
Americans are more likely to experience government as mediated through a national campaign
than through participation in a government program.38 We show that elite decisions about the
issues can at times raise the interest of select groups to the campaign, but we suspect as well that
there are broader effects of campaigns that, like policies, partially construct our understandings
of ourselves and others as citizens.
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).
38
32
Reference
Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Shanto Iyengar (1995). Going Negative: How Attack Ads Shrink and
Polarize the Electorate. New York: Free Press.
Bartels, Larry M. (2005). "Homer gets a tax cut: Inequality and public policy in the American
mind." Perspectives on Politics 3: 15-31;
Bartels, Larry M. (2008). Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
Princeton University Press.
Campbell, Andrea Louise (2003). How Policies Make Citizens: Senor Political Activism and the
American Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes (1960). The
American Voter. New York: Wiley.
Campbell, David E. (2006). “Religious "threat" in contemporary presidential elections.” Journal
of Politics 68: 104-115.
Carmines, Edward G. and James A. Stimson (1989). Issue Evolution: Race and the
Transformation of American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Citrin, Jack and Donald Philip Green (1990). “The self-interest motive in American public
opinion.” Research in Micropolitics 3:1-28.
Claibourn, Michele P. (2008). "Making a connection: Repetition in campaigns and the
development of candidate-issue connections." Journal of Politics 70: 1142-1159.
Clinton, Joshua D. and John S. Lapinski (2004). “"Targeted" advertising and voter turnout: An
experimental study of the 2000 presidential election.” The Journal of Politics 66: 69-96.
Eckstein, Harry (1975). “Case study and theory in political science.” In Handbook of Political
Science, Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby (eds). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, p. 79137.
Edelman, Murray J. (1964). The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Frymer, Paul (1999). Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Gaventa, John (1980). Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian
Valley. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
George, Alexander L. and Andrew Bennett (2005). Case Studies and Theory Development in the
Social Sciences. The MIT Press.
Goldstein, Ken, Michael Franz, and Travis Ridout (2002). “Political advertising in 2000.” The
Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Brennan
Center for Justice at New York University.
Goldstein, Ken and Paul Freedman (2002a). “Campaign advertising and voter turnout: New
evidence for a stimulation effect.” Journal of Politics 64: 721-740.
Goldstein, Ken and Paul Freedman (2002b). “Lessons learned: Campaign advertising in the 2000
elections.” Political Communication 19: 5-28.
Griffin, John D. and Brian Newman (2005). Are voters better represented? The Journal of
Politics 67(4): 1206-1227.
Hochschild, Jennifer and Bridget Scott (1998). “Trends: Governance and reform of public
education in the United States.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 62: 79-120.
Huckfeldt, Robert R. and John D. Sprague (1992). "Political parties and electoral mobilization:
political structure, social structure, and the party canvass." American Political Science
Review 86: 70-86.
33
Huckfeldt, Robert R. and John D. Sprague (1995). Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication:
Information and Influence in an Election Campaign. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Kinder, Donald R. and D. Roderick Kiewiet (1981). “Sociotropic politics: The American case.”
British Journal of Political Science 11: 129-161.
Kirkpatrick, David D. (2007). “The evangelical crackup.” The New York Times. Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28Evangelicalst.html?scp=2&sq=%22evangelical+crackup%22&st=nyt [Accessed January 29, 2008].
King, Gary, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg (2000). "Making the most of statistical
analyses: Improving interpretation and presentation.'' American Journal of Political
Science 44: 347-61.
Krugman, Paul (2000). "Reckonings: Gore's tax problem." The New York Times, September 10.
Leege, David C., Paul D. Mueller, Kenneth D. Wald, and Brian S. Krueger (2002). The Politics
of Cultural Differences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Martin, Paul S. (2003). Voting’s rewards: Voter turnout, attentive publics, and congressional
allocation of federal monies. American Journal of Political Science 47(1): 110-127.
Meier, Kenneth J. (1994). The Politics of Sin: Drugs, Alcohol, and Public Policy. M.E. Sharpe.
Mendelberg, Tali (1997). “Executing Hortons: Racial crime in the 1988 presidential campaign.”
The Public Opinion Quarterly 61: 134-157.
Mendelberg, Tali (2001). The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm
of Equality. Princeton University Press.
Mettler, Suzanne (2002). “Bringing the state back in to civic engagement: Policy feedback
effects of the G.I. Bill for World War II veterans.” The American Political Science
Review 96: 351-365.
Mettler, Suzanne and Joe Soss (2004). “The consequences of public policy for democratic
citizenship: Bridging policy studies and mass politics.” Perspectives on Politics 2: 55-73.
Mettler, Suzanne and Jeff Stonecash (2008). “Government program usage and political voice.”
Social Science Quarterly 89: 273-293.
Morone, James A. (2004). Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. Yale
University Press.
Pierson, Paul (1993). “When effect becomes cause.” World Politics 45: 595-628.
Romer, Daniel, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Christopher Adasiewicz, Ken Kensi, and Paul Waldman
(2004). Capturing Campaign Dynamics: The National Annenberg Election Study. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Rosenstone, Steven J. and John Mark Hansen (1993). Mobilization, Participation, and
Democracy in America. New York: Macmillan.
Schattschneider, E.E. (1960). The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in
America. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Schier, Steven E. (2000). By Invitation Only: The Rise of Exclusive Politics in the United States.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Schneider, Anne and Helen Ingram (1993). “Social construction of target populations:
Implications for politics and policy.” The American Political Science Review 87: 334347.
Sears, David O. and Jack Citrin (1982). Tax Revolt: Something for Nothing in California.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
34
Sears, David O., Richard. R. Lau, Tom R. Tyler, and Harris M. Allen, Jr. (1980). “Self-interest
vs. symbolic politics in policy attitudes and presidential voting.” The American Political
Science Review 74: 670-684.
Sears, David O. and Cary L. Funk (1990). “Self-interest and Americans' public opinions.” In
Beyond self-interest, ed. J.J. Mansbridge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 147170.
Sears, David O., Carl P. Hensler, and Leslie K. Speer (1979). “Whites' opposition to "busing":
self-interest or symbolic politics?.” The American Political Science Review 73: 369-384.
Sides, John and Andrew Karch (2008). “Messages that mobilize? Issue publics and the content of
campaign advertising.” Journal of Politics. 70: 1-12.
Soss, Joe (1999). “Lessons of welfare: Policy design, political learning, and political action.” The
American Political Science Review 93: 363-380.
Stoker, Laura (1994). A Reconsideration of Self-Interest in American Public Opinion. ANES
Pilot Study Report, No. nes010876.
Tomz, Michael, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King (2001). CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting
and Presenting Statistical Results. Version 2.0 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, June
1. http://gking.harvard.edu.
Unnever, James D., Francis T. Cullen, and Bonnie S. Fisher (2007). “"A liberal is someone who
has not been mugged": Criminal victimization and political beliefs.” Justice Quarterly
24: 309-334.
Valentino, Nicholas A. (1999). “Crime news and the priming of racial attitudes during
evaluations of the president.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 63: 293-320.
Valentino, Nicholas A., Vincent L. Hutchings, and Ismail K. White (2002). “Cues that matter:
How political ads prime racial attitudes during campaigns.” The American Political
Science Review 96: 75-90.
Verba, Sidney, Kay L. Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady (1995). Voice and Equality: Civic
Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Weaver, Vesla M. (2007). “Frontlash: Race and the development of punitive crime policy.”
Studies in American Political Development 21:230-265.
Wielhouwer, Peter W. and Brad Lockerbie (1994). "Party contacting and political participation,
1952-90." American Journal of Political Science 38: 211-229.
Zaller, John R. (2002). “The statistical power of election studies to detect media exposure effects
in political campaigns.” Electoral Studies 21:297-329.
35
Table 1: Material Appeals
Taxes ads on high income individuals and Social Security/Medicare ads on Senior Citizens
Taxes
Social Security/Medicare
Gore-Selective Taxes
Coefficient Standard Error Coefficient Standard Error Coefficient Standard Error
High income
.1249*
.0259
--.1083*
.0238
#
.0087
Cumulative Tax Ads
.0560*
.0170
--.0048
High Income by Cumulative Tax Ads
-.0068
.0186
--.0132*
.0066
Senior Citizen
--.0621*
.0321
--Cumulative Social Security/Medicare Ads
--.0209*
.0086
--Senior Citzen by Social Security/Medicare
Ads
--.0021
.0093
--Total Cumulative Ads
-.0066
.0042
-.0012
.0033
.0008
.0026
Days since January 1, 2000
.0005*
.0002
.0004*
.0002
.0005*
.0002
General/Primary Campaign
.1878*
.0239
.1792*
.0213
.1831*
.0230
Age
.0144*
.0005
.0133*
.0006
.0143*
.0005
Female
-1520*
.0135
-.1537*
.0124
-.1524*
.0135
Black
.0511
.0268
.0314
.0257
.0550*
.0270
Hispanic
.0071
.0402
-.0071
.0390
.0031
.0379
Completed High School
.0921*
.0330
.1300*
.0302
.0911*
.0330
Had Some College
.2687*
.0310
.3184*
.0290
.2667*
.0311
Completed College
.3740*
.0385
.4443*
.0357
.3744*
.0386
More than College
.4464*
.0362
.5403*
.0328
.4473*
.0365
Children under 18 at home
-.0224
.0162
-.0116
.0153
-.0233
.0163
Strength of Partisanship
.2382*
.0090
.2421*
.0090
.2368*
.0090
Tau1
1.152
.0471
1.143
.0498
1.138
.0500
Tau2
2.464
.0503
2.443
.0536
2.450
.0529
Number of Observations
27897
30774
27891
Initial log likelihood
-29708.55
-32855.73
-29708.56
Final log likelihood
-28011.47
-30960.12
-28017.14
Model Chi-Square
4871.50*
4218.68*
4085.32
Data Sources: National Annenbergl Election Study, 2000 and Wisconsin Advertising Group, 2000
Notes: Estimates are ordered probit estimates of campaign interest; advertising variables are scaled in 1000s of airings;
#
* p<.05, p<.10; dependent variable is coded 0= not much interested; 1 = somewhat interested; 2 = very much interested.
36
Table 2: Symbolic Appeals
Morality ads on born-again conservatives and crime ads on high income individuals
Morality
Crime
Coefficient Standard Error
Coefficient Standard Error
Born-Again Conservatives
.2176*
.0226
--Cumulative Morality Ads
.0927*
.0413
--Born-Again Conservative by Morality Ads
-.1172*
.0588
--High income
Cumulative crime ads
High income by Cumulative Crime Ads
Total Cumulative Ads
Days since January 1, 2000
General/Primary Campaign
Age
Female
Black
Hispanic
Completed High School
Had Some College
Completed College
More than College
Children under 18 at home
Strength of Partisanship
Tau1
---.0025
.0005*
.1804*
.0143*
-.1479*
.0360
-.0050
.1132*
.3027*
.4329*
.5301*
-.0213
.2322*
1.172
---.0026
.0002
.0213
.0005
.0131
.0266
.0387
.0315
.0301
.0372
.0342
.0156
.0086
.0471
.0955*
.0451
.1625*
.0008
.0005*
.1836*
.0144*
-.1525*
.0521*
.0013
.0918*
.2667*
.3748*
.4477*
-.0230
.2366*
1.134
.0251
.0328
.0536
.0026
.0002
.0236
.0005
.0135
.0266
.0380
.0330
.0311
.0388
.0366
.0162
.0090
.0497
Tau2
2.485
.0516
2.447
.0528
Number of Observations
29539
27891
Initial log likelihood
-31486.74
-29708.56
Final log likelihood
-29626.10
-28013.99
Model Chi-Square
4423.02
4210.17
Source: Annenberg National Election Study, 2000 and Wisconsin Advertising Group, 2000
Notes: Estimates are ordered probit estimates of campaign interest; advertising variables are scaled in 1000s of airings;
#
* p<.05, p<.10; dependent variable is coded 0= not much interested; 1 = somewhat interested; 2 = very much interested.
37
Table 3: Mixed (Symbolic and Material) Appeals
Health care and education ads on women with children at home
Education
Health Care
Coefficient Standard Error
Coefficient
Standard Error
Women with Children
-.0792*
.0279
-.0815*
.0274
Cumulative Education Ads
.0270*
.0105
--Women with Children by Education Ads
.0144
.0105
--Cumulative Health Care Ads
--
--
Women with Children by Health Care Ads
--
--
Total Cumulative Ads
Days since January 1, 2000
General/Primary Campaign
Age
Female
Black
Hispanic
Completed High School
Had Some College
Completed College
More than College
Children under 18 at home
Strength of Partisanship
Tau1
-.0030
.0004*
.1785*
.0143*
-.1293*
.0289
-.0060
.1267*
.3144*
.4391*
.5327*
.0185
.2415*
1.178
.0034
.0002
.0216
.0005
.0167
.0254
.0391
.0305
.0291
.0357
.0331
.1200
.0090
.0476
-.0193
.0144#
.0127
#
.0048
.0002
.0215
.0004
.0168
.0254
.0351
.0302
.0289
.0353
.0333
.0198
.0090
.0464
.0087
.0005*
.1868*
.0143*
-.1286*
.0324
-.0155
.1258*
.3106*
.4369*
.5302*
.0190
.2407*
1.179
.0077
Tau2
2.477
.519
2.479
.0506
Number of Observations
30774
30774
Initial log likelihood
-32855.73
-32855.73
Final log likelihood
-30959.55
-30962.47
Model Chi-Square
4710.78
4291.81
Data Sources: National Annenbergl Election Study, 2000 and Wisconsin Advertising Group, 2000
Notes: Estimates are ordered probit estimates of campaign interest; advertising variables are scaled in 1000s of airings;
#
* p<.05, p<.10; dependent variable is coded 0= not much interested; 1 = somewhat interested; 2 = very much interested.
38
Table 4: Mixed (Symbolic and Material) Appeals
Women
Cumulative Education Ads
Women by Education Ads
Cumulative Health Care Ads
Women by Health Care Ads
Total Cumulative Ads
Days since January 1, 2000
General/Primary Campaign
Age
Black
Hispanic
Completed High School
Had Some College
Completed College
More than College
Children under 18 at home
Strength of Partisanship
Tau1
Health care and education ads on women
Education
Health Care
Coefficient Standard Error
Coefficient
Standard Error
-0.1829*
0.0167
-0.1824*
0.0173
0.0183
0.0101
0.0229*
0.0079
-0.0032
0.0004*
0.1786*
0.0144*
0.0287
-0.0056
0.1269*
0.3142*
0.4393*
0.5326*
-0.0143
0.2419*
1.1579
0.0033
0.0002
0.0217
0.0005
0.0255
0.0393
0.0304
0.0290
0.0357
0.0331
0.0152
0.0090
0.0471
-0.0273*
0.0206*
0.0086
0.0005*
0.1871*
0.0144*
0.0319
-0.0153
0.1256*
0.3099*
0.4366*
0.5298*
-0.0139
0.2409*
1.1597
0.0125
0.0078
0.0048
0.0002
0.0216
0.0004
0.0254
0.0352
0.0301
0.0289
0.0353
0.0333
0.0151
0.0091
0.0463
Tau2
2.4573
0.0513
2.4589
0.0503
Number of Observations
30774
30774
Initial log likelihood
-32855.733
-32855.733
Final log likelihood
-30959.802
-30962.96
Model Chi-Square
4431.58
4089.29
Data Sources: National Annenbergl Election Study, 2000 and Wisconsin Advertising Group, 2000
Notes: Estimates are ordered probit estimates of campaign interest; advertising variables are scaled in 1000s of airings;
* p<.05, # p<.10; dependent variable is coded 0= not much interested; 1 = somewhat interested; 2 = very much interested.
39
Figure 1: Major Issues in 2000 Campaign Ads
Social Security, Medicare
31%
Health Care
29%
Education
27%
Background and Record
24%
Taxes
22%
Government Spending, Budget, Deficit,
Surplus, Debt
13%
Personal Character, Values
10%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40
Figure 2: Tax Emphasis and Mobilization of the Rich
Figure 3: Social Security/Medicare Emphasis and Mobilization of the Elderly
41
Figure 4: Gore's Selective Tax Emphasis and Mobilization of the Rich
Figure 5: Morality Emphasis and Mobilization of Religious Conservatives
42
Figure 6: Crime Emphasis and Mobilization of the Rich
Figure 7: Education Emphasis and Mobilization of Mothers
43
Figure 8: Health Care Emphasis and Mobilization of Mothers
Figure 9: Education Emphasis and Mobilization of Women
44
Figure 10: Health Care Emphasis and Mobilization of Women
45