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This paper studies changes in voting preferences over election campaigns. Building on the literature on spatial models and valence issues, we study whether (1) ideological distance to political parties, (2) assessments of party competence to handle different policy issues, and (3) voter-updated candidate evaluations are factors that explain shifts in voter choices in the weeks preceding the election. To test our hypotheses, we use data from three survey panels conducted for the 2008, 2011 and 2015 Spanish general elections. Our findings show that valence factors are more influential than ideological indifference to account for campaign conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts the second-order theory for regional elections to the test. Not by analysing voting behaviour but with the use of campaign data. The assumption that regional campaigns are overshadowed by national issues was verified by analysing the campaign tweets of Flemish politicians who ran for the regional or national parliament in the simultaneous elections of 2014. No proof was found for a hierarchy of electoral levels but politicians clearly mix up both levels in their tweets when elections coincide. The extent to which candidates mix up governmental levels can be explained by the incumbency past of the candidates, their regionalist ideology, and the political experience of the candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public discourse in India's northeastern state Meghalaya is dominated by issues of tribal identity and the threat of being overwhelmed by outsiders. In the context of national elections, local campaigners have to respond to and navigate between the different requirements of national and regional politics. Election campaigns, understood as a negotiation process during which campaigners act as brokers, provide insights into the narratives and characteristics of politics in Meghalaya. Manifestos, leaflets and large-scale events communicate a statement about organisational strength and a candidate's popularity, and subsequently about the capacity to ultimately deliver to the voter. Aesthetics used during campaigning such as music and clothing styles carry messages about the awareness and closeness of the campaigner to the imagination and needs of the local population. Although the entrance of social media into election campaigning is about to change elections and the role of campaigners in Meghalaya, local campaigners will remain important due to their ability to navigate between different levels of politics and to resolve contradictory campaign messages by drawing on different semiotic registers of campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have shown that market orientation influences content. However, scant research examines how news organizations with different market orientations covered the same story. This study utilizes textual analysis and long-form interviews to compare coverage of the 2013 St. Louis mayoral race. The study compares the strongly market oriented St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the weakly market oriented St. Louis Beacon. Findings showed major differences in content, especially concerning how the two covered race, periphery candidates and the presentation of campaign issues. These results are interpreted through the lens of gatekeeping theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective How do immigrants become politically active? While this process has been extensively studied, the role of ties to formal and informal institutions of society has been understudied. We test whether informal (political discussion) and formal (connections to community organizations) ties encourage immigrant voters to participate in other campaign activities. Methods Data were collected through a 2008 exit poll of Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA voters. Along with assessing the bivariate relationship between social ties and campaign participation, we use a Poisson event count regression model to control for alternative explanations. Results The positive relationship between social ties and campaign participation among immigrant voters disappears once we control for alternative explanations. There is, however, a positive relationship among the native born (including second-generation immigrants). Conclusion Voters need to acquire personal resources, and become assimilated into American political culture, before social ties have an effect on campaign participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for the difference between peaceful and violent elections in semi-authoritarian countries? This article analyses the influence of electoral management bodies (EMBs) on the likelihood of widespread violence triggered by opposition protest during election times. It is argued that by establishing inclusive and collaborative relationships through which political actors can jointly negotiate important electoral issues, EMBs influence the incentive structure of the major stakeholders in favour of non-violent strategies. The relationship is explored by comparing elections in Malawi (2004), Ethiopia (2005) and Zanzibar (2005). The analysis supports the idea that inclusive EMBs, rather than legal independence, are critical to guarantee the influence of the opposition in order to address both their interests and their mistrust of electoral politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The UK general election of 2010 should have been a critical one for women. But it was not to be. Despite all of the main political parties claiming to want more women MPs the increase in their number relative to the 2005 Parliament was just 2.5%. Women remain under-represented numerically in the House of Commons, constituting less than one-quarter of all MPs. The election campaign was largely women free too, as women married to politicians gained more attention than women politicians. Moreover, and despite enhanced inter-party competition over the women's vote—or rather, and more accurately, the votes of middle income mothers, otherwise known as the ‘mumsnet’ vote—women's issues and perspectives were marginalised from the campaign proper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Otto Kirchheimer's well-known diagnosis of 'catch-all' partism in Western Europe rests on an implicit causal argument about the consequences of social change for political parties. This article takes up the causal story underlying Kirchheimer's account and traces its implications for a specific, though central, party activity: campaigning. As Kirchheimer discerned, the transformation of advanced industrial societies radically altered the context of parties' strategic decision-making. In the area of election campaigning, parties confronted heightened incentives to approach the electorate with 'persuasive' rather than more traditional 'mobilizing' appeals and developed a greatly increased demand for reliable information about voter preferences. These shifts, in turn, had consequences for party organization, promoting the centralization and marginalization of individual members Kirchheimer associates with the catch-all party type. Through the lens of campaign change, then, we can observe the causal processes that unite the diverse features Kirchheimer links to his catch-all party -- although our attention is also drawn to ways in which party development has not conformed to Kirchheimer's expectations. This article illustrates these intersecting processes with a discussion of Labour and Conservative campaigns in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthy party grassroots constituency organisations play an important part in modern electoral campaigning, especially in marginal seats, and political parties try to concentrate their efforts on those closely contested constituencies. Recent evidence on party fund-raising at a local level shows that the Conservatives have taken considerable strides in supporting their campaign organisations in marginals, and have done so in a way which enhances their long-term campaigning potential there. The party's grassroots organisations are increasingly well-resourced, especially in the seats the Conservatives need to win back if they are to win the next General Election. However, while fund-raising suggests a healthy grassroots where it is needed, party membership data highlights continued problems for the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to untangle the way in which the political campaigns--especially the television campaigns--influenced in the electoral preferences of the two main candidates. Based on available data of political advertisement and using diverse statistical models, this article shows that the relationship between advertisement and preferences is not direct. The influence of media in preferences happens through two mechanisms that are frequently studied in media literature: agenda-setting and priming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The study of campaigns has generally focused on a search for effects at the mass level, but little research has explored the behavior of those who actually attempt to influence voters. This essay reports findings from interviews carried out with elites in Spain, an institutionally and culturally diverse country that offers a unique environment for looking at party strategies. Three important findings emerge from the interviews: (1) all campaigns rely on a combination of mobilizing partisans and chasing after non-aligned voters; (2) when appealing to voters, parties prefer to emphasize their advantaged issues; and (3) Spanish elites question the existence of an ideological center. Together these points lend support to issue ownership or saliency theories of campaigns. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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 effects of political marketing are difficult to measure. This article contends that "multi-dimensional case analysis"-i.e., the comparison of similar elections across demographic levels and across time-can reliably assess the impact of political marketing on campaign outcomes. A multi-dimensional examination of Congressman Harold Ford Jr.'s sophomore surge demonstrates the potential impact of candidate positioning. Specifically, the congressman' s shift to the center of his Memphis, Tennessee, constituency significantly enhanced his electoral performance. This substantive finding carries a methodological lesson: the evaluation of marketing effects is greatly improved through the use of a tightly structured research design that employs, not large-scale statistical analysis or controlled field experimentation, but in-depth, case-by-case investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral rallies in public plazas cannot predict the winner of the elections, although they do reflect the cultural dimension of politics. In this article, the qualitative analysis of electoral rallies explains both the existence of alternative projects for citizenship and the nation and their conflictive rootedness in political culture. By comparing the different political parties' rallies in 2000 and 2006, the author looks in detail at three components of political culture: symbolic physical space, social space and discursive space. campaigns, political appropriation of public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering cross-cultural aspects of political communication, this study explores how political advertising plays a conspicuous role as an indicator of cultural orientations by comparing and contrasting videostyles of the televised political spots between the United States and Korea since the presidential election campaigns held in 1992. A content analysis of verbal, nonverbal and production components of the videostyles shows that televised political spots were highly reflective of the respective cultural values with regard to high/low-context communication, degree of uncertainty avoidance, nonverbal expressions, and the social aspect of Che-Myon. Thus, indigenous cultural values tend to be reproduced in idealized form through political advertising so that people of each country can identify closely with the political candidate of the spots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on events involving politics and government in the Central African Republic as of January 2011. Topics discussed include political context of the general elections held in January 23, 2011, position of the organization National Election Observatory regarding the process, and the public rehabilitation of late dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa by current President François Bozize.