POLSCI 242 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Center For Responsive Politics, Pork Barrel
POLISCI 10.14 Lecture Notes
Campaign Messages
Announcements
Take a look at the campaign memo
Final writing assignment – do a race/organization that looks are races across the country
Opensecrets.org political parties info on federal campaign expenditures, etc.
Presidential campaigns are moving earlier
Clinton and Bernie held some headlines with the first Democratic debate – the other candidates
did not appear on headlines
Why do we care about campaign messages?
o Voters know less about the candidates (relative to the general election)
▪ More room for influence voter attitudes and evaluations
▪ Change evaluative criteria
• Challengers: personal leadership qualities, issue stances
• Incumbents: prior office experience, pork-barrel projects
o Learn about their members of Congress
▪ Incumbent President – kind of easy for an average voter to attribute state of
economy, country, etc, to one person
▪ Incumbent congressional member (535 members) – making the move from policy to
evaluation is HARD
• Harder to assess how one member of Congress contributed to the policies
and condition of the country
▪ Citizens have less info and thus need more info to be interpreted
SULKIN
o Do campaign promises translate into policy?
o So what?
▪ Sincere Inform inattentive voters
• If the promises are sincere and reliable, it might inform inattentive voters
• Speaks to the types of information available
• Rationally ignorant
o Benefit of voting – voting someone who accurately represents your
beliefs
o Costs – spending time and energy to find out information about the
candidates
o If individuals can get that information (through campaign appeals)
without spending the cost, elections are doing their job!
o Idea of democratic accountability
▪ Trust
• Two scenarios:
• Policy commitment follow through accurate representation!
• Policy commitment ignore
• Is this too vague of a measure?
o Two ways to learn about the relationship between campaign message and legislative
behavior
▪ 1) Issue positions (roll call votes)
• Difficult because of strategic reasons and the complexity of bills
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Take a look at the campaign memo. Opensecrets. org political parties info on federal campaign expenditures, etc. Final writing assignment do a race/organization that looks are races across the country. Clinton and bernie held some headlines with the first democratic debate the other candidates. Presidential campaigns are moving earlier did not appear on headlines. Incumbent president kind of easy for an average voter to attribute state of. Sulkin: do campaign promises translate into policy, so what, sincere inform inattentive voters. If voter doesn"t know the mc candidate, they will fall back on partisan cue. If voter does know the mc candidate, they will use personal criteria (not necessarily driven by policy implications) such as projects brought to the district, personal leadership qualities. Challenger: interactive, risky strategies, negativity, issues/partisanship. Jacobson* - different ways of evaluating candidates depending on whether we know them or not: reminding voters who are not familiar with the candidate of the same party, personal competence, endorsements.