Effects of pronoun use in campaign advertisements on young Taiwanese voters

Campaign advertisements can greatly influence voters; however, the effects of subtle variations in advertising content have rarely been investigated. This study was conducted to quantify the effects of minor variations in pronoun use on young Taiwanese voters’ responses to campaign advertisements. Also examined were the moderating effects of voters’ perceptions of the candidate’s personality characteristics as shaped by the candidate’s physical appearance and the camera angle used in the candidate’s photo. The experimental results indicated that the use of the pronoun “we” in a campaign advertisement led to a closer perceived relationship between voters and the candidate compared to the inclusive pronoun “you,” which generated better advertising effects. Moreover, the results showed that when the voters visually inferred that a candidate had higher competence or when the candidate was photographed from a low angle, which created the perception of greater power, the use of the pronoun “we” was more suitable. The inclusive “you,” in contrast, was more suitable for candidates that were perceived by the voters to have greater warmth or for candidates that were photographed from a high angle, which created the perception of less power.     

DECEPTION AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: THEORY AND LABORATORY EVIDENCE

We model two‐candidate elections in which (1) voters are uncertain about candidates' attributes; and (2) candidates can inform voters of their attributes by sending advertisements. We compare between political campaigns with truthful advertising and campaigns in which there is a small chance of deceptive advertising. Our model predicts that voters should vote in‐line with an advertisement's information. We test our model's predictions using laboratory elections. We find, in the presence of even a small probability that an advertisement is deceptive, voters become substantially more likely to elect a “low‐quality” candidate. We discuss implications of this for existing models of voting decisions. (JEL C92, D72, D82)     

Media use and political participation reconsidered: the actual and perceived influence of political campaign messages

This study examines the actual and perceived effects of political advertising on the voting intention of less-experienced eligible voters. Elaborating on the demobilization, stimulation, and influence of presumed influence hypotheses, this study examines the effects of political disaffection, presumed influence, and political efficacy on political mobilization. The study analyzes the effects of political advertisements on 311 college voters. The results of the structural equation modeling (SEM) suggest that instead of demobilizing turnout, self-reported exposure to political advertisements boosts young voters' sense of political efficacy and stimulates their political participation by raising the degree to which they perceive that campaign advertisements affect other voters.     

Presidential Priming: Incumbent and Challenger Advertising

This study focuses on the influence of television advertising to prime voters to evaluate candidates based on policy issues or personal image attributes. Results come from a content analysis of presidential political advertisements, newspaper stories, network news stories, and a national survey during the 1996 campaigns. The study found support for advertising priming in the aggregate. Mixed support was found for the influence of individual campaign advertising and the news media to influence voters' evaluation of the candidates. The analysis did show a strong role for the traditional party challenger to prime voters about himself and his major opponent.     

Pre-election polling and third party candidates

I analyze voters’ incentives in responding to pre-election polls with a third party candidate. Third party supporters normally have an incentive to vote strategically in the election by voting for one of the major candidates. But these voters would vote third party if the third party candidate is doing surprisingly well in the polls. Because voters are more likely to vote third party if the third party candidate is doing well in polls, voters who like the third party candidate best have an incentive to claim they will vote third party in the polls so that more voters will ultimately vote third party in the election. The differing incentives faced during polls and elections accounts for why third party candidates do better in polls than in elections.     

The Relative Irrelevance of Candidate Sex

Abstract

This study tests the relevance of candidate sex to electoral contests. We predict that voters, in general, will use issue or party cues to select between candidates and not the sex of the candidate. This will not hold under two conditions: party or issue cues are unavailable or candidate sex is likely to be particularly salient to the voter. Data were collected from a random sample of registered voters who were presented with hypothetical elections featuring candidates who were systematically varied by party, position on abortion, and sex. The results are consistent with the line of research that suggests that the majority of voters do not use candidate sex as a cue for choice, but candidate sex does affect choice among those for whom gender equality issues are particularly salient. Although generally irrelevant, candidate sex can have significant implications for the outcome of particular contests.     

Media use and political learning: Comparing Trump supporters to celebrity candidate voters

This study examines whether political media use behaviors of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election align with those of “celebrity candidate voters” portrayed in the literature. The study used a national online survey (N = 1,608) conducted during the 2016 primary, and findings reveal that Trump supporters, more than other voters, are driven by entertainment motivations and follow campaign news using entertainment media: specifically, the video-sharing site YouTube. Although Trump voters are interested in the campaign, their level of political knowledge is lower than other voters, and no one media outlet made a significant contribution to their learning. A comparison group of other voters showed significant knowledge gains from news websites and Twitter. Results for Trump voters are consistent with scholars’ characterization of the celebrity candidate audience, particularly in studies suggesting that celebrity politicians may increase citizens’ engagement through entertainment gratifications rather than by a desire to become informed.     

An experiment on coordination in multi-candidate elections: The importance of polls and election histories

Do polls simply measure intended voter behavior or can they affect it and, thus, change election outcomes? Do candidate ballot positions or the results of previous elections affect voter behavior? We conduct several series of experimental, three-candidate elections and use the data to provide answers to these questions. In these elections, we pay subjects conditionally on election outcomes to create electorates with publicly known preferences. A majority (but less than two-thirds) of the voters are split in their preferences between two similar candidates, while a minority (but plurality) favor a third, dissimilar candidate. If all voters voted sincerely, the third candidate — a Condorcet loser — would win the elections. We find that pre-election polls significantly reduce the frequency with which the Condorcet loser wins. Further, the winning candidate is usually the majority candidate who is listed first on the poll and election ballots. The evidence also shows that a shared history enables majority voters to coordinate on one of their favored candidates in sequences of identical elections. With polls, majority-preferred candidates often alternate as election winners.     

THE ILLUSION OF INTIMACY TELEVISION AND THE ROLE OF CANDIDATE PERSONAL QUALITIES IN VOTER CHOICE

The role of television in the increased candidate orientednessof voters in U.S. presidential elections was examined usingdata from eight National Election Studies conducted by the SurveyResearch Center at The University of Michigan. The importanceof candidate personal qualities and traits was estimated usingvoter responses to open-ended questions about the candidates.Candidate personal qualities became more important for televisiondependent voters during the 1960s, and in each post-1964 electionwere less important for voters who relied on newspapers thanfor those who relied on television. The differences did notappear to be a function of the higher level of education ofnewspaper readers.     

Meta-cognition and resistance to political persuasion: evidence from a three-wave panel study

ABSTRACT

We investigate the temporal course of meta-cognition and resistance processes following exposure to counter-attitudinal information in the 2012 Presidential election. Using a unique 3-wave survey panel design, we tracked eligible voters during the last months of the 2012 campaign and experimentally manipulated exposure to negative political messages targeting Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on an online platform. As predicted, we found that politically unengaged (vs. engaged) individuals were less likely to counter-argue a message attacking their favored candidate. Resistance, in turn, led to increased attitudinal certainty, polarization, and correspondence with actual voting behavior over the course of the campaign. These findings provide the first analysis of the longitudinal effects of meta-cognitive processes underlying persuasion for real-world attitude change and behavior.     

ONE THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE: COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY, POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE, AND THE 1980 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Despite high expectations, students of the 1960 and 1976 presidentialdebates were unable to find much evidence that these eventssignificantly affected voters' candidate preferences. As a result,scholars have turned increasingly to cognitive consistency theoriesto explain viewers' reactions (Or nonreactions) to debates.This article argues that one key mediating variable determiningwhether or not voters are influenced by debates is their levelof political knowledge. Looking at the largely ignored 1980Carter-Reagan debate, we find that voters with generally lowlevels of knowledge are particularly affected by the debate,and significant shifts in candidate preferences do occur amongthis group. The evidence suggests that the debate was an importantfactor in Ronald Reagan's bid to unseat his Democratic opponent.     

The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class1

White working‐class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that “moral values” played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans’ policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is extremely resonant to this set of voters, and we use in‐depth interviews to uncover this framework. A key feature of this framework, on which in the 2004 presidential election George W. Bush scored high and John Kerry scored low, is the appropriate attitude to wealth, which serves as an indicator for a candidate’s general moral philosophy and as a heuristic about whether the candidate will govern with working‐class voters’ interests in mind. National Election Studies data support the argument that this was a key influence on the voting decision in 2004, even controlling for voters’ partisan identification.     

The Electoral Consequences of Marriage and Motherhood: How Gender Traits Influence Voter Evaluations of Female Candidates

Recent literature largely dismisses the notion that voters engage in direct bias against women based on sex alone. Making a distinction between sex and gender, our theoretical expectations predict that female candidates who violate gender norms for marriage and motherhood will receive lower candidate evaluations, particularly so among voters who hold conservative beliefs about the proper role of women. We use a survey experiment to estimate the direct and conditional effects of gender traits and gender role beliefs on evaluations. Our results support the proposition that candidate traits, such as marital and parental status, can prime gender beliefs in the evaluative process.     

Iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies in binary voting agendas with sequential voting

This paper describes the correspondences between the results given by backward induction (BI) and iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies (IEWDS) in binary voting agendas with sequential voting. When the voters have strict preferences over all candidates, the strategies that survive IEWDS all select the unique candidate selected by the BI strategy profiles. But if some voters are indifferent, this result no longer holds. However, when there are only two candidates, it is possible to demonstrate strong relationships between the results given by BI and IEWDS, even when some voters have indifferences.     

VOTERS' INTERMEDIATION ENVIRONMENTS IN THE 1988 PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST

Considerable information about a presidential election campaigncomes to voters through such intermediaries as personal networksand the mass media. This article examines the operation of theseintermediaries in the 1988 Ohio presidential campaign by focusingon exposure to them and the perceived partisan content of theirmessages—and how these key features of intermediationrelate to various voter characteristics. People are most disposedto discuss politics with like-minded relatives and friends,but discussions with co-workers provide an opportunity for politicallydissonant messages to intrude. This political discussion ismodulated by political attentiveness rather than personal orpartisan characteristics. Media exposure is high and also isrelated most to political attentiveness, although age is animportant determinant as well. Surprisingly, the media werecommonly perceived as balanced and neutral in the presidentialrace or, where committed, as supporting the candidate the respondentopposed. Because of this, only a third of the respondents foundthemselves in an overall intermediation environment that wasconcordant with their own preferences. Considerably more werein environments containing some discordant views, which couldchallenge their partisan dispositions.     

ELECTORAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND THE COST OF UNPOPULARITY

When considering electoral campaigns, candidates receiving contributions from relatively unpopular industries should be regarded less favorably by voters that have information on the sources of funding. To offset this unpopularity effect, politicians may either demand more money for campaign advertising from these industries in order to persuade less informed voters, or shy away from unpopular contributors to avoid losing the support of the informed electorate. Our model predicts that the first effect dominates, and electoral contributions are increasing in industry unpopularity. By using U.S. House elections data and different identification strategies, we provide robust evidence in favor of our predictions. (JEL D72, P16)     

Simple plurality versus plurality runoff with privately informed voters

This paper compares two voting methods commonly used in presidential elections: simple plurality voting and plurality runoff. In a situation in which a group of voters have common interests but do not agree on which candidate to support due to private information, information aggregation requires them to split their support between their favorite candidates. However, if a group of voters split their support, they increase the probability that the winner of the election is not one of their favorite candidates. In a model with three candidates, due to this tension between information aggregation and the need for coordination, plurality runoff leads to higher expected utility for the majority than simple plurality voting if the information held by voters about the candidates is not very accurate. Received: 12 September 2000/Accepted: 8 November 2001     

The two-party system under alternative voting procedures

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. This observation can be explained by the strategic behavior of voters. This article derives two broad classes of voting procedures under which strategic voting behavior induces a two-party system under standard assumptions on voter preferences. One class consists of the voting procedures with unique top-score, i.e., under which a voter can cast a top-score vote for only one candidate (e.g., Plurality Voting, Borda Count). The other class consists of the voting procedures that permit truncated ballots, i.e., under which voters do not have to cast all their votes (e.g., Approval Voting). This analysis suggests that the key for strategic voting behavior to induce a two-party system is that voters can always cast a different score for the two candidates they rank first and second on their ballots.     

Credibility or Credulity? Examining Political Organization-Public Relationships in an Election of Interloping Candidates

ABSTRACT

This national online survey (N = 493) examined the political organization-public relationship (POPR) that voters perceived with their own political party and their opposing political party, as well as voters’ assessment of the credibility of candidates running for president during the primary season of the 2016 election. Results indicated that although credibility assessment of one’s own party’s candidate was much as expected, POPR with the Democratic Party was generally stronger than that with the Republican Party. Data showed no evidence that a poor POPR with one’s own party would drive voters to support interloper candidates. We conclude by reflecting on the importance of POPR with the opposing party and what weak relationships may mean for parties in the long term.