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The essential purpose of the paper is to analyze the tendency of personalization of politics in electoral campaigns as a result of the change within party organizations, understood as institutional arrangements and adjustments that political parties have had to assume to remain present in the electoral system. Mexican parties, by maximizing the media visibility of the candidates and their personal qualities, delegating political experience to the background (Rahat, 2015) and, on the other hand, due to the personal political leadership they have developed. The case studies presented are two. The first is the 2012 presidential election, marking the return to power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with its candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, under a campaign scheme based on the party's structural support, but also due to high media exposure of life personality of a politician with personal charismatic qualities. The second case that is analyzed is the victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, it supposes the rise of a recently created political party; National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) who saw in the figure of his candidate the means to be a protagonist of national political life. Both cases represented government alternations and show two contrasting types of political leadership from their origin and in the way they developed their political careers to reach the presidency of the Republic. It is also important to note that there are exogenous factors that drive partisan change and the emergence of personal political leadership. Among them is the decrease in partisan identities (Moreno, 2009), the volatility of the vote (Díaz and Vivero, 2015) and the increase in the use of digital communication media. All this contributes to the fact that electoral campaigns are in the postmodern stage (Díaz, 2016) characterized by prioritizing the exposure of the personal image of the candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 U.S. general election saw the emergence of a nonpolitician celebrity, Donald Trump, who frequently challenged existing power structures and figures. Trump's electoral win combined with reports of violence at campaign rallies, calls for removal of those in power, the ridicule of opponents, and the use of invectives and name‐calling suggest parallels to Bakhtin's elucidation of the carnivalesque. The authors examined media coverage of the 2016 campaign to uncover evidence of carnivalesque references. Such references were significantly higher for Trump than for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and for the 2012 Republican campaign of Mitt Romney. The implications of presidential campaigns steeped in carnivalesque rhetoric and actions are discussed, with concerns raised regarding the future of media institutions and participatory democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital platform has deeply changed the electoral campaigns, producing a consequent evolution of political consulting. Social networks have become the mainstream media so that the digital strategist and the big data analysts have achieved a special place in the "war room," next to the campaign director and the pollster. In 2012, Obama's election has marked the entrance in the "Fast Politics": resulting, on one hand, in 24 hours news, a large amount of auto-generated contents produced by the voters through digital media, fragmentation, instantaneous transmission of messages and, on the other hand, a reduction of the attention threshold. Once again, similarly to the past, the evolution of the media (2.0) ends up changing the nature of election campaigns and political consulting request. What happens in Europe? The objective is to carry out a comparative analysis on the professionalization of candidates' electoral staff. We wanted to verify if the American model has been imported in Europe with special focus on the techniques and the style of election campaigns management. In particular, within a comparative approach among the European states, the study analyzed the usage of political consulting and the degree of "digitalization" during last general elections: an ancillary practice or, on the contrary, a new tool for consensus? The comparative analysis among European states exploited the data provided by Comparative Candidates Survey (CCS 2013) and constructed synthetic indexes on the professionalization and digitization campaigns, conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political debate research has investigated gender in the contexts of mix-gendered debates and women's political campaigns, but how does gender factor in political debates between men? To address this question, I analyze the three 2012 U.S. General Election debates between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney. I find that Obama and Romney described crises for the American family that they sought to resolve by enacting presidential masculinity designed to protect the national family: either as a nurturing father who works with families (Obama) or as a strong father who works on behalf of families (Romney). Both strategies involved enabling families to be more effective social and economic units with appropriate help from the state. Examining these strategies illustrates how debates rhetorically stabilize broader discourses of gender relations and frame the need for and possibility of social justice activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's data-driven campaigns, presidential targeting strategies rely on detailed perceptions about the political leanings and policy positions of Americans to decide which registered voters to contact and which messages to emphasize in their outreach. However, identifying supporters and opponents of a candidate's policy positions is far from foolproof. This reality results in some citizens encountering political message(s) on congruent issues, where their issue stance aligns with the messaging candidate, and others encountering incongruent issue message(s), where the candidate and message recipient do not share the same position. Examining official contact records from the 2012 presidential campaign of Republican Mitt Romney, I find evidence that Romney's campaign had some success when targeting Democrats with congruent issues. Messaging Democrats with an issue where they and Romney share common ground is associated with decreased support for Obama, increased abstention, and increased support for Romney. Contacting Democrats with an incongruent message and contacting Republicans with either an incongruent or congruent issue message had minimal effects on the voting behavior of the recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 2012 re-election campaign, President Barack Obama implemented what would become a highly controversial political ad called "The Life of Julia." This ad followed the life of a fictional person named Julia -- whose life was demonstrated to be better as a result of the welfare state programs of the Obama administration. Reaction to the campaign ad was so negative that it was quickly removed from President Obama's official website, and to this day cannot be found there. Staunch resistance to the ad stemmed from the accusation that it glorified the idea of a welfare state and illustrated what a life without genuine purpose or meaning would look like. In Julia's world, the state was all that mattered, and all of her life's decisions were supposed to support the legacy and longevity of the state -- at the expense of her natural, God-given liberties and her individuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last twenty years, there has been a tremendous amount written on “negativity” in political campaigns. Yet, there is a conceptual disconnect between the definition of negativity used by researchers and how citizens define negativity. In this article, we show how large this disparity is and what its consequences are. Using a nationally representative online survey of 17,400 Americans and nearly 100 scholars of American politics who viewed presidential ads from the 2012 general election, we show that citizen perceptions of negativity are much stronger predictors of political participation than scholar codings of negativity. This means researchers need to give serious thought to how they operationalize negativity in their work. If we have any interest in understanding how voters are affected by campaign information that they perceive as being negative, then we must collect data consistent with the public’s understanding of negativity. Otherwise, we risk the continuation of this conceptual disconnect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how Republican and Democratic candidates utilized Twitter to manage their impressions during the 2012 U.S. Senate elections, and examined their discussion of political issues and character traits across three types of tweets: campaign tweets, campaign-selected retweets, and tweets that mentioned their respective opponent. Candidates aligned with and trespassed party-based ownership of issues and traits across the tweet types. In the aggregate, Republicans discussed Republican-owned issues and traits more than Democrats, and Democrats emphasized Democrat-owned issues more than Republicans. This party alignment broke down when examined across winning and losing candidates, yielding varying routes to electoral success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have emphasized the importance of an informed citizenry for a healthy democracy. As a result, research has examined whether campaign information fosters positive or negative democratic outcomes. This article examines the relationship between information seeking and skepticism. We also examine whether skepticism leads to democratically beneficial outcomes. We examine these relationships using survey data collected during the course of the 2012 Presidential Election. We found an over-time relationship between campaign information seeking and skepticism. We also found that skepticism leads to increased knowledge at the end of the election through information seeking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the differences between online and traditional campaign techniques by content analyzing tweets by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during the 2012 general election campaign. Specifically, this paper answers the research question: are candidates sending more negative campaign messages online? Through content analyzing over 800 tweets and conducting a Iogit analysis, it is determined that candidates do take a more negative approach online as well as making different appeals than they would through traditional media sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the impact of populist sentiment on musical representation in the general U.S. presidential election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. Topics covered include the roles of populist rhetoric and policy in the 2016 campaigns of Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, popular music's role as an integral element in the 2012 campaigns of Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Barack Obama, and how popular music pedagogizes the electorate.

In 2012 the French Socialist Party imported the "Obama method" to organize the widest canvassing experiment of the country, leading to the victory of François Hollande. The direct transfer, as well as the wide similarity of practices on the ground, make these two campaigns a very good lens for comparing French and American civic culture. This article explores these two campaigns from a micro-sociological perspective, based on ethnographic studies carried out in Northern France and California in 2012. While door-to-door practices appear similar on the two sides of the Atlantic, they differ in terms of the room left for politics. While in France, party members politicized the interactions at the door and spoke politics all the time, American volunteers actively avoided it. This difference is linked to the underlying civic norms prevailing in both countries, but also to the party structures in which they take place. While the Obama campaign was carried out by paid organizers and "plug-in" volunteers, in France it was led by long-time party members. In the two cases, despite the intensive grassroots activities of the campaigns, participation has not empowered the participants, engagement appearing too superficial in the US or touching only highly politicized activists in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last several presidential elections, much attention has been paid to campaign field offices. A number of analyses have investigated the impact of field offices on vote choice, but there have been very few investigations of whether and to what extent campaign field offices influence voter turnout. Using data from the 2012 election, I examine the impact of Obama and Romney field offices on county-level turnout. I find that the presence of campaign field offices in counties across the United States increased turnout by a small amount. The results presented here add to the literature on campaign effects by showing that field offices-an increasingly important component of modern presidential campaigning-can influence levels of political engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in an agenda-building theoretical perspective, this study explored in depth the relationships between political campaign information subsidies and elite national news media coverage. Specifically, this investigation examined three levels of agenda-building linkages (object, attribute, and network connections) simultaneously during the 2012 US Presidential Election pre-convention period between Barack Obama (Democrat) and Mitt Romney (Republican). A total of 2655 campaign information subsidies and 345 news stories were content analyzed. The results suggest solid support for all three levels of agenda building. Our findings indicate the strongest linkages were at the third level for stakeholder network associations and at the second level for substantive issue frames. Campaign blog posts, press releases, and issue platforms were the most effective agenda-building tools at this phase of the election campaign. The theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a key element of their strategy, recent Presidential campaigns have recruited thousands of workers to engage in direct voter contact. We conceive of this strategy as a principal-agent problem. Workers engaged in direct contact are intermediaries between candidates and voters, but they may be ill-suited to convey messages to general-election audiences. By analyzing a survey of workers fielded in partnership with the 2012 Obama campaign, we show that in the context of the campaign widely considered most adept at direct contact, individuals who were interacting with swing voters on the campaign’s behalf were demographically unrepresentative, ideologically extreme, cared about atypical issues, and misunderstood the voters’ priorities. We find little evidence that the campaign was able to use strategies of agent control to mitigate its principal-agent problem. We question whether individuals typically willing to be volunteer surrogates are productive agents for a strategic campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the outset of the 2012 presidential race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney touted his private sector leadership of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As this election unfolded, Romney's Bain Capital story became less of a narrative he could run on and more of a narrative he had to run from. Why did this Bain Capital story, a story about someone's success in the free marketplace in a society that seemingly values such success, become so troubling for the Romney campaign? This question constitutes the centerpiece of the present essay. In addressing this question, we argue that the Bain Capital narrative's role in the 2012 presidential race divulges a great deal about the fundamental nature of economic discourse in American democracy. Specifically, we contend that the economic narratives circulating in American democracy actually construct a tale of two economies--a tangible economy and a speculative economy. Unfortunately for Romney, his Bain Capital narrative situated him on the wrong side of this economic divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship into American political parties argues that the power to nominate presidential candidates has not entirely devolved from the party to voters but retains party influence via a network of allied actors including political consultants. Once party elites coalesce around a preferred candidate, primary voters tend to comply with their will. However, scholarship has not yet shown whether consultants help produce this effect. Consultants, even those with close contractual ties to the party organization, do not behave as this view expects, and they worked for several GOP candidates in 2012, enhancing intraparty competition rather than rallying around the front-runner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did Mitt Romney’s religion—Mormonism—help or hurt him in his campaigns for the presidency? While Romney’s religious affiliation was generally viewed as an electoral liability, Americans’ ambivalence about Mormons presented the possibility that, depending on framing, it could be neutralized or could perhaps even become a political asset. Survey experiments during both Romney’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns suggest that although Romney’s religion was a detriment when he ran the first time, it had largely ceased to be an issue in 2012. Although Mormonism did not have much effect on Romney’s performance at the polls in the general election of 2012, however, Romney’s candidacy has had an effect on perceptions of Mormonism. In the wake of his campaign, attitudes toward Mormons have become politically polarized, with Republicans holding a far more positive view of them than Democrats, with Independents in the middle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to an Obama campaign ad as part of an Internet survey conducted during the final weeks of the 2012 presidential race produced a substantial 2.8-point increase in intentions to vote for Obama. A post-election follow-up survey found an increase in reported votes for Obama that was only half as large, consistent with the notion that ad effects decay over time. However, a closer look at the pattern of decay indicates that the effect of ad exposure remained virtually constant among people who were undecided or predisposed to support Obama. The reduced aggregate effect was almost entirely attributable to Romney supporters who moved toward Obama in the immediate wake of ad exposure but returned to Romney by Election Day. This divergence is inconsistent with an interpretation of decay as reflecting simple forgetting. Rather, it suggests an active process of motivated reasoning in which short-term persuasive effects are gradually eroded or even reversed by counterarguing among people predisposed to resist them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The U.S. Presidential campaign of 2012 saw an upsurge in politically conservative stances and heated discourse with pundits debating issues pertaining to immigration, women's reproductive rights, gay marriage, and unemployment. Woven into this mesh of political diatribe were concerns regarding the growth of hate and extremist groups within the United States. This paper will examine the political discourse on issues underlying the 2008 and 2012 Presidential campaigns as concerns regarding traditional family structure, immigration, and a host of other hotly debated social issues could be argued to be an instigating factor in the growth of the white supremacy and extremist movements across the country. It is hypothesized that increasingly mean spirited political rhetoric combined with an escalation of conspiracy theories and right-wing paranoia has resulted in an environment conducive to the growth of hate and extremist groups. Results will indicate a surge in extremist and hate group membership from 2007 to 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 2012 presidential election, the major candidates and political parties assembled extraordinarily detailed political dossiers on every American voter. These dossiers allowed them to target voters based on the likelihood of their registering to vote, supporting a candidate, donating to a campaign, or casting a ballot on Election Day. Despite this pervasive use of big data techniques, the privacy implications of data-driven campaigning have not been thoroughly explored, much less regulated. This Article suggests that political dossiers may be the largest unregulated assemblage of personal data in contemporary American life. It analyzes the main sources of voter data and the absence of privacy laws regulating the collection and use of such data. It also explores the potential privacy harms of voter microtargeting under the twin rubrics of information privacy (control over personal information) and political privacy (the personal sphere necessary for democratic deliberation and self-determination). This Article advocates a modest proposal for addressing these harms, which has two components. The first is a mandatory disclosure and disclaimer regime requiring political actors to be more transparent about their use of voter microtargeting and related campaign data practices. The second is the enactment of new federal privacy restrictions on commercial data brokers that would equally apply to firms providing data consulting services to political campaigns. This proposal is necessarily modest because it operates in the shadow of the First Amendment. The Article concludes by defending both components of the proposal against likely constitutional objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial attitudes toward African American candidates are partially explained by symbolic racism, which has replaced overt racism in responses to these candidates. However, as typically operationalized, symbolic racism as applied to candidate assessments fails to account for the emotions generated by a political campaign. Symbolic racism's effects are moderated when emotional responses to Barack Obama are included in a candidate evaluation model, while emotions remain an important predictor. While symbolic racism and negative emotions lower evaluations, the presence of the positive emotions generated by the 2012 campaign counteracted both. Inclusion of both symbolic racism and emotion is necessary to understand perceptions of Obama as a black presidential candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor notes the theme of the issue, the 2012 U.S. presidential election, and discusses articles on subjects including the use of political satire in the campaign, racist appeals used by candidate Mitt Romney, and psychological aspects of partisanship.

This research tested the conventional wisdom that interactive voice recognition (IVR; also known as robocalls or auto calls) are not listened to by receivers. The study found that three out of four people (75%) listen to over 19 s of a message, which equates to over 40 words. The vast majority of people, 97%, listen to at least 6 s. This innovative, unobtrusive field approach for measuring actual listening time eliminates self-report bias. The unique data set, provided by a third-party vendor, consisted of 156 call projects with a total of 389,588 live answered phone calls from the last week of the 2012 election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consistent with other media covering the 2012 presidential campaign, political cartoons attended to the events surrounding the three presidential debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. While political cartoons offer a humorous visual commentary, they are part of the campaign media narrative, and are perhaps more memorable than many stories or columns themselves. This analysis discusses the attention to and portrayal of particular candidate performance in the 2012 presidential debates, and how particular statements or behavior was visually demonstrated in political cartoons, and also discusses the implication of such portrayals and attention in cartoons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This report explores the variables related to partisan selective media exposure, a process by which people select media outlets and content consistent with their political predispositions. This study employs national survey data (N = 876) during the month of October 2012 immediately prior to the U.S. presidential election. Political orientation (i.e., liberal, moderate, or conservative) served as the dependent variable. The analysis revealed that political orientation was related to gender, race, and religion. The civic engagement variables of participation in a church project and participation in volunteer work within one’s community were also related. Finally, the results suggest that conservatives were most prone to use conservative talk radio, Christian radio and TV, and Fox News. Liberals were more prone to use PBS and Facebook. As such, the data indicate that audience members appear to seek out partisan media and messages consistent with their political leanings. The implications of partisan selective media exposure concerning the development of political knowledge are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, exposing the articulation of two incongruous discourses: arguments for increasingly strict regulations on women's reproductive rights and antiregulatory attacks on Obamacare. Drawing on articulation theory and on a Foucauldian understanding of biocitizenship, we argue that women's reproductive and sexual capacities were discursively disarticulated or split from their status as free citizens and rhetorically affiliated with Obamacare as both entities came to be seen as potentially dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a theoretical model consisting of three mechanisms that link metacoverage, a type of election campaign news, to mediatization, a meta-process in which media organizations influence politics. The mechanisms hinge on the point that metacoverage—consisting of both topics and frames—constitutes a rich set of process-oriented cues that influence how campaign organizations adjust to the media logic in the course of performing functions associated with the office-seeking political campaign logic. A case study of 2012 US presidential election news was conducted to illustrate how metacoverage influences campaign strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we profile the advertising activities and deception levels of the top 2012 spending independent expenditure groups that focused on the presidential contest. From December 1, 2011, through Election Day, November 6, 2012, independent expenditure groups spent more than $360 million on presidential television advertising, according to Kantar Media CMAG. More than a fifth of the dollars spent by the top groups purchased ads containing at least one claim judged as misleading by independent fact checkers. The proportion of dollars that these groups spent on ads containing at least one deception was much greater during the primaries than afterward. During the primaries, the pro-Romney super PAC “Restore Our Future” led the pack both in dollars spent on ads containing at least one deception and in the proportion of its ads found deceptive by the fact checkers. During the general election, in the post-primary period, the pro-Obama super PAC “Priorities USA Action” devoted the most dollars and greatest proportion of its total dollars to ads in which fact checkers found at least one deceptive claim. During some but not all of the 2012 election year, the percentage of third party ads containing at least one deceptive claim was higher among those groups not required to disclose their donors than it was among those required to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2012, only the GOP had a contested primary. As of March 2012 none of the four candidates remaining in the race (Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum) had secured enough delegates to claim the nomination, indicating that this primary season would drag on (McCain clinched the 2008 Republican nomination on March 4, 2008). This protracted primary meant that the Republicans had to devote most of their efforts to their immediate opponents, rather than concentrating on President Barack Obama. Obama did not have to worry about attacks from his own party. This study applies Benoit’s functional theory to 143 primary television spots from this campaign. This sample of ads broke with tradition by attacking as much as they acclaimed. The topic of utterance was split about evenly between policy and character. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay reports the results of an analysis of undecided swing state voters during the six presidential debates of the 2008 and 2012 elections. Combining Real Time Response with a pretest-posttest design, the researchers identify the overall impact of the debates on undecided voters, both successful and unsuccessful message strategies, and changes in the overall perception of the candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]