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In Central Europe's first free election, Hungarian campaign architects created a genre of television advertising designed to communicate political party values by linking them with values of national importance. Using Rokeach's two-value typology, this culture-based study analyzes the political commercials produced by the nation's predominant parties in 1990 for their values-related content. Hungarian scholars, media experts and party officials contributed to this interpretive analysis of the campaign's visual images for their reflection of national and political values. Results suggest that political commercials are useful for identifying prevailing values and can contribute to an understanding of a nation's culture. The study has particular importance for advertisers in countries which are undergoing the transition to a free-market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the impact of ethical judgments about televised political commercials on global attitude toward the ad. Findings from the quasi-experiment indicate that the "ethical" attribute belongs to a set of salient, "utilitarian" cognitions that influence how political commercials are evaluated. These findings suggest that ethical perceptions really matter. However, certain emotional "hedonic" cognitive responses, which voters say are nonsalient in their overall evaluations of political ads, in fact may circumvent the powerful impact of ethical-and other salient-cognitive elements. Implications for political advertising strategy and public policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though operating within a different electoral system, Great Britain is rapidly following in the footsteps of the United States in the area of political communications. Electoral communications, including advertising, have found a place in the British political process. This study seeks to find what place and is based largely on personal interviews with politicians, party officials, broadcast and print journalists, academicians and advertising agency executives. Emphasis is on the marketing and communications efforts of the Conservative Party as the leader in the trend toward American-style campaigning. However, both the Labour Party and SDP/Liberal Alliance are also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Islamic sentiments have become central to right-wing populist mobilization in Western societies, which often results in negative portrayals of Muslims in political campaigns. Although these portrayals may have detrimental effects on minority members' identity formation and attitudes toward majority members, little is known about their effects on members of the depicted group. A lab experiment with 145 young Muslims reveals that right-wing populist ad exposure increases perceived discrimination, which in turn decreases individuals' self-esteem and national identification, and encourages hostility toward majority members. Religious identification, in contrast, is not affected by ad exposure. Implications of these findings for intergroup relations and democratic processes are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of sound-bite news is one of the most widely bemoaned findings in political communication research. Yet, the detrimental effects of this trend have been more assumed than demonstrated. This study examines one consequence of sound-bite journalism: the creation of incomplete argument, in which speakers presenting their political position in the news do not also justify it. Drawing on data about television news in Germany, Russia, and the United States, it shows that shrinking sound bites consistently reduce the probability of opinion justification across widely differing national contexts. Sound-bite journalism emerges as harmful to television news' ability to produce public justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People generally have imperfect introspective access to the mechanisms underlying their political beliefs, yet can confidently communicate the reasoning that goes into their decision making process. An innate desire for certainty and security in ones beliefs may play an important and somewhat automatic role in motivating the maintenance or rejection of partisan support. The aim of the current study was to clarify the role of the DLPFC in the alteration of political beliefs. Recent neuroimaging studies have focused on the association between the DLPFC (a region involved in the regulation of cognitive conflict and error feedback processing) and reduced affiliation with opposing political candidates. As such, this study used a method of non-invasive brain simulation (tRNS) to enhance activity of the bilateral DLPFC during the incorporation of political campaign information. These findings indicate a crucial role for this region in political belief formation. However, enhanced activation of DLPFC does not necessarily result in the specific rejection of political beliefs. In contrast to the hypothesis the results appear to indicate a significant increase in conservative values regardless of participant's initial political orientation and the political campaign advertisement they were exposed to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campaigns invoke identity appeals to specific groups of voters, including women. To understand whether these campaign appeals matter in affecting voters’ choices, we must better understand how women respond to these appeals, the causal mechanism driving responses, and whether male and female candidates can use these ads with equal effectiveness. Using a nationally representative sample of American voters and an experimental design, we test an identity-based appeal aimed at women. We find that, although candidates of either gender can use these ads to affect women’s votes, only female candidates are able to prime female voters’ gender identity. The use of these appeals by male candidates persuades female voters of their positive traits. Male voters are generally unaffected by the appeals. Given the integration of women and men in the general population, our results demonstrate the utility of targeted appeals in encouraging support from a specific group and avoiding backlash from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the effects of competitive and cooperative motivations on contributions in a field experiment. A total of 10,000 potential political donors received solicitations referencing past contribution behavior of members of the competing party (competition treatment), the same party (cooperative treatment), or no past contribution information (control). We first theoretically analyze the effect of these treatments on the contribution behavior of agents with different social preferences in a modified intergroup public good (IPG) game. Then, we report the empirical results: Contribution rates in the competitive, cooperative, and control treatments were 1.45%, 1.08%, and 0.78%, respectively. With the exception of one large contribution, the distribution of contributions in the competitive treatment first order stochastically dominates that of the cooperative treatment. Qualitatively, it appears that the cooperative treatment induced more contributions around the common monetary reference point, while the competitive treatment led to more contributions at twice this amount. These results suggest that eliciting competitive rather than cooperative motivations can lead to higher contributions in IPG settings. ( JEL D72, H41, C93) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our contribution analyses the influence of campaign advertisements on vote choice in the 2011 elections to the Swiss National Council. Concretely, we ask whether and to what extent the relative exposure to party ads of a preferred party exerts a reinforcing effect on an individual's party choice. We make use of the two-wave panel structure contained in the RCS survey data of the Selects 2011 and combine it with data on advertisements in 20 important national and regional newspapers. We find that increasing exposure to the campaign of one's preferred party may reinforce individuals with strong party attachment in their initial vote choice. Yet this effect only materializes with substantial campaign duration and exposure. Additional and exploratory analyses revealed that particularly the two recently emerged parties, the GLP and BDP, might have made a slight difference by potentially persuading defecting voters with the help of their campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between popular music and politics in America as of 2013, focusing on an analysis of whether a political campaign's unauthorized use of a song infringes upon the rights of the musical performer in question. American trademark laws and the legal rights associated with songs and sound recordings are mentioned, along with trademark infringement claims. The U.S. Lanham Act, American copyright laws, and songs such as "Wavin' Flag" by K'naan are examined.

We link the intensity of campaign competition in different electoral systems with the number of candidates running for public office and their ideological differentiation. We show that proportional elections have more candidates, competing less aggressively in campaign spending, than those in majoritarian elections. Candidates’ ideological positions, however, can in general be more differentiated in majoritarian or proportional elections. We also study the equilibrium effects of plurality premiums and the consequences of heterogeneity among candidates in nonideological characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite pundits and scholars suggesting that racial appeals play to voters’ emotions, very little is known about the emotional impact of these appeals. Most of the research on racial priming seems to conflate the effect of negative emotions. Our theory suggests that anger and fear, in the context of an implicit racial appeal, influence whites’ views about race differently. We suspect this effect occurs because anger and whites’ negative racial attitudes are tightly linked in memory. Using an experiment over two waves, we induce anger and fear from an implicit racialized campaign ad and find that anger uniquely boosts opposition to racial policies among white racial conservatives. We also find that anger from an implicit racial appeal motivates racial liberals to be more supportive of racial policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors investigate whether the news media and the tone of actual ads aired during a political campaign influence people’s perceptions of campaign ad tone. Using data on the content of political advertising, local television news coverage, and local newspaper coverage in nine races in five midwestern states in 2006, the authors discover that perceptions of ad tone respond to both exposure to advertising and exposure to local news media. Both positive and negative advertising drive tone perceptions, and the impact of ad coverage depends not on its volume or mentions of tone but on whether that coverage is framed strategically or not. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most used theories in the research of political debates is the functional theory of campaign discourse. However, the theory has been criticized for being too culturally limited. In the present article, a Finnish presidential debate is analyzed from the perspective of functional theory. The goal is to critically evaluate the applicability of functional theory to the analysis of Finnish political campaigning. The results show that a Finnish presidential debate differs in many ways from an American presidential debate. The study shows how strongly the culture is reflected in political television debates and how important it is to take account of the cultural perspective in the development of a theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop an approach to studying public opinion that accounts for how people process competing messages received over the course of a political campaign or policy debate. Instead of focusing on the fixed impact of a message, we emphasize that a message can have variable effects depending on when it is received within a competitive context and how it is evaluated. We test hypotheses about the effect of information processing using data from two experiments that measure changes in public opinion in response to alternative sequences of information. As in past research, we find that competing messages received at the same time neutralize one another. However, when competing messages are separated by days or weeks, most individuals give disproportionate weight to the most recent communication because previous effects decay over time. There are exceptions, though, as people who engage in deliberate processing of information display attitude stability and give disproportionate weight to previous messages. These results show that people typically form significantly different opinions when they receive competing messages over time than when they receive the same messages simultaneously. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for understanding the power of communications in contemporary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last decades, academic research strongly poses again that image to a politician is of up most importance, specifically in vote obtaining campaigns. The predominance of the candidate's image in the political message is a direct effect of the professionalizing of electoral campaigns and it is regarded as personalizing of politics. The following article explains how personal image is managed in the electoral communication process and states that personalizing, even when it simplifies the political debate, has also shown to facilitate it. The key through which simplification of the message does not lead it to its triviality can be found in the proper suitability between the image projected and the personal image which supports it. When a politician can support, through his own biography and personal qualities, a government project, it adds a guarantee to improve not only political dialogue, but political acting itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on opinion changes in the U.S., Australia, and Great Britain during an election campaign based from Gallup Polls. It notes political scientists' view that election campaigns have minimal impacts on election outcomes. It concentrates on the voting intention in Great Britain and Australia and the presidential approval in the U.S. It adds that people are now more responsible when voting, with 3 and 5 percent of voters who switch back to their original intentions on election day.

Little evidence links the strategic decisions of campaigns to individual-level voting behavior. Yet for campaigns to matter in the way that experts argue, exposure to campaigns must also matter, so there should be observable differences in the structure of vote choice between battleground and nonbattleground states. Combining presidential campaign data with the Senate Election Study, the authors show that intense campaigning can activate factors such as race, ideology, partisanship, and presidential approval. The authors find that the campaigns affected different variables in 1988 than in 1992, which they hypothesize is the consequence of campaign messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which aims to investigate the political participation and the difference of level of perception of women on U.S. election in 2006 and 2008. The study made us of role model effect theory to explore the political participation of 18-23 years women voters in 2008 compared in 2006. Results indicate that 2008 women voters were more skilled to talk about politics than those in 2006. Results also show that women were less cynical on politics in 2008 election than in 2006.

The article examines French Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal's use of gendered discourse during the 2007 French presidential elections as a means to appeal to voters. Particular attention is paid to how Royal's campaign highlighted the fact that she was a woman and how the strategy was received within the context of French political culture derived from the republican tradition of the French Revolution. An analysis of how three French newspapers, "Le Figaro," "Le Monde," and "Libération," responded to her campaign strategy is presented.

The existing literature on gender effects in the electoral process offers little evidence of significant gender vote share differentials. In this paper it is shown that for the 2006 Canadian federal election, once candidate campaign spending is introduced into the model with appropriate flexibility in the vote share responsiveness across genders, significant differences are found to exist between male and female candidates. The findings suggest that, for equal levels of spending, male incumbents have a vote share advantage relative to female incumbents, though this vote share advantage is found to diminish with increased expenditures. Female non-incumbent candidates, on the other hand, have a vote share advantage over male non-incumbent candidates for higher levels of expenditure and this advantage was found to increase with increased expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some research on gender bias in news coverage of political campaigns indicates that the media portray male and female candidates differently. Research to date, however, has focused only on elections to national or statewide offices, where confounding variables such as party, incumbency, and competitiveness are present. The authors resolve this problem by focusing their analysis of media campaign coverage on nonpartisan, open-seat, and competitive may-oral races. The authors' content analysis of press coverage in six mayoral elections suggests that press coverage is not biased in favor of male candidates. The authors, however, find that the presence of a woman on the ballot expands the range of issue coverage in local campaigns in ways favorable to perceived strengths of female candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of candidate campaign spending on votes and abstention in multiparty elections is estimated from the specification of a structural model of voter behavior. This model accounts for the endogeneity of campaign spending as well as the heterogeneity in voter preferences. Empirical results are estimated from aggregate (actual) election data. The results demonstrate the importance of spending during the campaign period and voter heterogeneity with respect to these expenditures. The own- and cross-expenditure vote share elasticity estimates reveal that political campaign spending not only redistributes voters across parties but also decreases the size of the abstaining group of the electorate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo habla de los medios de comunicación y cómo influyen la acción política. Se menciona algunos factores que se entrometen en el diseño de la realidad política, por ejemplo las rutinas profesionales y las características individuales de los periodistas. El artículo también presenta reflexiones publicadas en un informe anual de la profesión periodística. Resultados de encuestas sobre el impacto que el mensaje político tiene en los ciudadanos están mostrados.

Focuses on a study which addressed how the Afro-Americans were treated during the 2000 presidential election in the United States. Political records of Afro-Americans in the country; Overview of the practice of Black politics; Significance of the election to the Afro-American community.

Explores the treatment to the Afro-American population in the United States during the presidential election on November 7, 2000. Description of Black politics in the post Black power era; How the abandonment of the radical political humanism was highlighted during the election; Factors contributed to the substantive context for the growth of contemporary black business, political, cultural and intellectual elites.

ABSTRACT: When it comes to the nation's pressing social problems, there is a depressing gap between both parties' aspirations and the federal resources now available. The nation has moved from an era of $200 billion deficits to equally outsized surpluses, but bipartisan ambitions have paradoxically shrunk. The author reviews problems where money would indisputably make a difference--such as the 44 million Americans with no health insurance, growing inequality in wages and wealth, and the myriad challenges facing urban education--and suggests promising directions for reform that are not being discussed in the presidential campaign. He also analyzes other issues not being debated, such as the size of the defense budget and the burden of payroll taxes, and urges the press to play a role in raising these issues when candidates will not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: The Annenberg 2000 study of the primaries found that voters learned the issue distinctions stressed by the candidates and that these distinctions influenced votes. The study also found that those in heavily contested primaries learned more than did voters in states with less contact with the candidates and their campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT. The research reported in this article set out to explore the variation in political knowledge over time during the 2000 presidential primaries. Knowledge is broken down into three distinct types: candidate awareness, biography, and policy. Results show that citizens did learn substantive amounts of information during the campaign and that learning and overall levels of knowledge were most pronounced in respondents who lived in a state where a primary was held and was competitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on a study which argued that presidential campaign events are multifaceted and their effects are occasionally substantial. Why presidential campaign events do not have strong effects; Possibility that previous studies have misspecified the independent and dependent variable; Sources of confusion over campaign effects.

Examines the influences of voter turnout in the United States. Voting in the US as a two-stage process; Role of campaign factors; Principal determinants on registration status.

Presents a historical account of the political changes in Southern States from 1956 through 1972. Analysis on presidential voting activity in the region; Comparison of regression coefficients for Southerners and non-Southerners; Regional and time variation in the perceptual screening of party identification.

Discusses several views on politics. Advantages of independent variables used as pooling measures; Claims on the distribution of variables related to the mass and the elite; Comparison of demographic data in cities.

Comments on the views of Robert Jackman on the role of political elites and mass publics in the democratic society. Regression equations for the elite and mass samples presented by Jackman; Difference of education between mass and elite subjects; Statistics on variable differences of both samples.

Re-examines the July 1998 elections in Cambodia to better understand the concepts underlying the `Prisoners' Dilemma.' Victory of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP) of most seats in the elections; Fear of voters of profound personal consequences on choice of votes; Contribution of two election campaigns to the opposition supporter dilemma; Description of CPP electoral strategy.

Describes the nature of candidate organizations as convention participants and its influence on environment changes. Activities involved on the political campaign of candidates; Role of organizational measures in providing campaign necessities of candidates; Necessities of political candidates during campaigns.

Investigates the influence of gender differences in news coverage and the candidates' sex on people's perceptions of gubernatorial and senatorial candidates. Expected differences for gubernatorial and senatorial candidates; Overview of study; Design of content analysis; Content analysis findings; Development of prototype articles; Experimental design; Sex stereotyping.