Browsing by Subject "Political Behavior"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The battleground effect: how the Electoral College shapes post-election political attitudes and behavior.
    (2009-08) Hendriks, Henriët
    Every four years, Americans elect a president through the curious institution called the Electoral College. As a result of its structure, which prioritizes states over individual votes, presidential candidates focus on only a handful of states, the so-called battleground states, while virtually ignoring the rest of the country. In this dissertation, I examine the consequences of this campaign strategy for voters' post-election attitudes toward politics and U.S. senators' voting behavior immediately after the election. Using public opinion data from the National Election Studies and the National Annenberg Election Survey, I find that the differences in levels of trust, efficacy, and interest between safe and battleground state residents are minimal. However, when accounting for differences in states' political cultures, I detect battleground effects. Voters living in states with more traditional political cultures are hardly affected by candidates' battleground strategies whereas voters in states with moralistic political cultures are more efficacious, trusting, and interested in politics when their state is also a battleground state. The particulars of presidential campaign strategies also subtly affect senators' roll call voting. Senators who share the president's party and represent battleground states are slightly more supportive of presidential policy positions than those representing safe states. I propose that these senators returned favors they enjoyed during the campaign season. Moreover, if they ran for reelection themselves, they are even more supportive. This dissertation shows candidates' battleground strategies have effects that extend beyond Election Day at both the elite and mass levels, thereby expanding our conception and understanding of the role of presidential elections and campaign effects in American politics.
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    The Informative Power Of Campaign Advertising
    (2018-06) Motta, Matthew
    Americans' abilities to vote for candidates who represent their policy views has important implications for their representation in government. However, while policy voting theoretically requires knowing where candidates stand on major policy issues (i.e., "campaign knowledge"), it is most typically studied in relation of what people know about civics (i.e., "civic knowledge"). I advance prior research by considering how Americans acquire campaign knowledge, and whether or not this information helps voters select candidates who share their policy preferences. I theorize that policy-focused political ad exposure provides most people with campaign knowledge – especially those who are the least politically engaged. Americans in turn use this information, more so than civic knowledge, to vote for candidates whose issue stances match their own. Merging campaign advertising data from the Wesleyan Media Project into nationally representative cross-sectional and longitudinal opinion data, I find consistent support for both sets of expectations. I conclude by discussing the informational benefits of policy-focused advertising, and considering the impact of changing media and campaign dynamics on Americans' knowledge about politics.
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    Taking Campaigns Personally: The Big Five Aspects and Political Behavior
    (2015-08) Chen, Philip
    How do political campaigns and personality traits interact to produce differences in political behavior? This dissertation examines this question, demonstrating across a variety of behaviors and traits that political campaigns cannot be understood without considering the influence of personality traits, nor can personality in politics researchers continue to ignore the influence of situational factors such as political campaigns. Working within the structure of the Big Five personality system and using a series of experiments, I show that political campaigns alter the expression of personality traits, changing how dispositions influence voters' likelihood of voting, political participation, attitude polarization, and information seeking. I claim that voter personality cannot be understood in isolation from the political context (or vice-versa); instead, personality effects are heterogeneous contingent on the political situation.