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Although online social networks are not exclusively homogeneous, partisans from similar political backgrounds do tend to cohere together. Interactions with these politically like-minded others could potentially reinforce their political identities and promote affective polarization between members of opposing political parties by increasing positive affect toward in-party members and negative affect toward outparty members. Such affective schisms potentially influence voting behavior--a key outcome variable that has long-term implications for policy making and governance. Using panel data collected during the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, this study shows that politically homogeneous online social networks promote positive feelings toward the in-group candidate but not negative affect toward the out-party. These positive feelings increase the likelihood of voting for the in-group candidate in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election. However, the indirect effect of online social network homogeneity on voting behavior via positive feeling is not significant. This indirect effect becomes significant when partisanship strength is accounted for, and it is particularly pronounced among weak partisans. [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 investigates how citizens select election news online. Voluntary national samples (n = 372) browsed a news website featuring four types of election news (horserace, candidates’ issue positions, campaign trails, and voters). Their online activities, including article selection and the length of exposure, were unobtrusively measured by behavior tracking software. The results revealed that participants tended to choose issue-based election coverage but avoided news stories about campaign trails. The horserace was not more popular than the other types of election news. The findings also supported negative bias by showing that participants preferred election news headlines that contained negative words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Consumption cues (e.g., brands, money, and advertisements) can have powerful effects on cognition, perception, and behavior, yet how people regulate responses to such cues is not well understood. This is surprising given that consumption cues are increasingly present in nontraditional consumer contexts, such as healthcare, education, and politics. This research develops a measure of two types of consumer regulation strategies, cue-based and budget-based (studies 1-4), and demonstrates that these strategies influence how people respond to consumption cues in a political context (study 5). Specifically, in a study involving the 2012 American Presidential Election, priming survey participants as consumers (versus citizens) influenced both voting intentions and self-reported voting behavior, and the newly developed consumer regulation scale was instrumental in detecting this effect. These findings suggest there may be merit in the escalating debate and concern over referring to voters as consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vast literature indicates that racial animosity has a pervasive influence on the public’s evaluations of U.S. President Barack Obama. Can political communications enhance and/or defuse the link between White Americans’ racial attitudes and evaluations of Barack Obama? In this article, we report the results of an experiment conducted in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign which examines the effect of political rhetoric on the extent to which evaluations of Barack Obama are racialized. Drawing from research on attitude strength and pretreatment effects in experimental studies, we argue that the use of racial appeals in the pretreatment environment and the strength of citizens’ preexisting attitudes toward the incumbent president may produce a downward bias in average estimates of racial priming effects toward President Obama. After accounting for individual differences in the propensity to form strong attitudes with need to evaluate, we observe substantial effects of campaign rhetoric in priming racial attitudes toward President Obama, especially among individuals who are low in the need to evaluate and who tend to have more malleable political attitudes. We conclude by discussing implications for research on racial priming and the politics of racial intolerance in evaluations of Barack Obama. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research uses 2012 National Election Studies data to explore how parenthood shapes the public opinion of women and men. Our analyses show that being a parent shapes attitudes on issues directly connected to children, such as government funding for education and day care, but also on issues less connected to the day-to-day activities of parenting, including the appropriate role of government and abortion. While the label “Walmart Mom” captures the reality that a large and growing number of mothers are struggling economically, the effect of motherhood, on most issues, holds for all women, regardless of socioeconomic status. This article discusses the implications of our findings concerning the politics of motherhood and fatherhood in light of the changing structure of America’s families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of political punditry at a time when Big Data is playing a greater role in campaign journalism. It focuses on the dispute between data journalist Nate Silver and the pundits over his predictions during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. A qualitative content analysis is used to assess the online commentary in the weeks before the election. Silver's supporters touted his statistical approach while critics questioned Silver's methods and cited their own gut feelings about the campaign's outcome. When the election results vindicated Silver, most pundits resolved their cognitive dissonance by declining to give him any credit. The research suggests pundits not only favored their own party in their predictions but also tried to keep uncertainty about the elections results alive and bolster the value of their work. This research not only suggests a new method for covering America's political process, but adds to our understanding of political punditry and the advancement of Big Data journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The role of marketing in presidential politics in the United States has introduced lessons for marketing executives on how to more effectively build up brand loyalty and fend off competition. The same technological breakthroughs in marketing that have powered corporate America were used by the Obama presidential campaigns in both 2008 and 2012 to microtarget potential donors and voters, carry out massive fund-raising campaigns, and energize a base of citizens through newly minted movements at a level of sophistication not witnessed previously in other sectors. The same techniques continued to be used in the 2016 presidential campaign, and the paradigm shift in marketing put forward in this article is represented with the introduction of a Strategic Triad that integrates the use of Big Data, microtargeting, and social media by organizations in the political, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do elections affect citizens? This paper shows that elections can have an impact in an area where researchers least expect it: an individual's religious life. It does so by drawing on psychologists' theory of compensatory control and testing whether individuals' reported religious behaviors and beliefs fluctuate with their chosen political party's fortunes. Both an originally collected panel data set and over-time cross-sectional data reveal that Democrats (Republicans) are more likely to report attending religious services and praying when Republicans (Democrats) control the White House. Rates of reported religious behaviors then decline when a copartisan is president. The results demonstrate political identities' strength and ability to influence nonpolitical behaviors, even those thought to be stable and impervious to politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on agenda setting and electoral politics often suffers from lack of access to data on deliberative processes, a shortcoming that often leads to inflexible theoretical outcomes. In this article, I assess the viability of a new data source—Google web search data—for use in social science research. Such data, when collected and applied appropriately, offer a unique lens through which information on patterns of information seeking can be drawn. I examine data on the final phase of the 2012 US presidential election and present findings along two lines. First, sensitivity tests demonstrate that web search information can proxy for public opinion. Second, testing of hypotheses finds that candidate presence on the campaign trail, although generally correlated with increased interest in political issue, is subject to media- and event-specific modifying effects. These findings underline this article’s principal contention that web search data are a viable resource for scholars of political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with staffers from the 2012 Obama and Romney presidential campaigns and qualitative content analysis of their Twitter feeds, this article provides the first inside look at how staffers used the platform to influence the agendas and frames of professional journalists, as well as appeal to strong supporters. These campaigns sought to influence journalists in direct and indirect ways, and planned their strategic communication efforts around political events such as debates well in advance. Despite these similarities, staffers cite that Obama’s campaign had much greater ability to respond in real time to unfolding commentary around political events given an organizational structure that provided digital staffers with a high degree of autonomy. After analyzing the ways staffers discuss effective communication on the platform, this article argues that at extraordinary moments campaigns can exercise what Isaac Reed calls “performative power,” influence over other actors’ definitions of the situation and their consequent actions through well-timed, resonant, and rhetorically effective communicative action and interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewing a hostile media bias against one’s group (e.g., political party) is a perceptual effect of media use. When it comes to the portrayal of political parties in the United States, prior research suggests that both Democrats and Republicans see mainstream media coverage as favoring the other side, regardless of the orientation of the political news coverage. Although prior research has not identified all factors that make this perceptual bias more likely, or at explaining how or why this perceptual effect occurs, we do know that it is related to one’s group identity. In this study, we examined salient predictors of hostile media bias during the 2012 presidential campaign. Individual (i.e., political cynicism) and group identity related (i.e., group status, intergroup bias, political ideology) differences of media users predicted such perceptions. But, the medium selected for political information about the campaign also mattered. The use of two media in particular—TV and social networking sites—appear to have blunted hostile media bias perceptions, whereas the use of two other media—radio and video sharing sites—appear to have accentuated perceptions that the media were biased against one’s party [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As with the first televised debates in 1960, the 2012 US presidential debates accentuated the importance of nonverbal behavior in political competition, with President Obama receiving widespread criticism for his disengaged and arguably inappropriate communication style in the first debate. To investigate the perceptual impact of such nonverbal expectancy violations, this study first employs an experimental design to examine the consequence of inappropriate leader displays, operationalized as nonverbal behaviors that are incongruent with the rhetorical setting. Theoretical explanations about the evaluative consequences of inappropriate leader displays are described in light of expectancy violations theory. Results of a repeated measures eye-tracking experiment find support for the prediction that inappropriate facial expressions increase visual attention on the source of violation, prompt critical scrutiny, and elicit negative evaluations. These findings are further explored with qualitative analysis of focus group responses to key moments from the first and third presidential debates. The discussion considers the broader implications of nonverbal communication in politics and how expressive leader displays serve as meaningful cues for citizens when making sense of televised political encounters. [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.

This paper argues that surface-level analysis of political argument fails to explain the effectiveness of ideological enthymemes, particularly within the context of presidential debates. This paper uses the first presidential debate of the 2012 election as a case study for the use of "Obamacare" as an ideological enthymeme. The choice of a terminological system limits and shapes the argumentative choices afforded the candidate. Presidential debates provide a unique context within which to examine the interaction of ideological constraints and argument due to their relatively committed and ideologically homogenous audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Recent research has shown that female US House candidates were more likely to talk about so-called “female issues” on Twitter during the 2012 election (Evans and Clark, 2015). In this paper, the author extends this former work by investigating the Twitter activity of all US House representatives during their 2012 election and seven months later (June and July of 2013). The purpose of this paper is to show that women do talk more about “female issues” than men, but do not only focus on these issues.Design/methodology/approach This paper content analyzes the tweets sent by female and male representatives in the 113th Congress during their 2012 elections, and seven months later.Findings Female representatives spend significantly more time devoted to “female issues” on Twitter than male representatives, but their time is not dominated entirely by “female issues.” Even though the difference is not statistically significant, women sent more tweets about “male issues” than men both during and after the 2012 election. Women tweet more than men about “women,” but they also care about business issues, as is evidenced by that issue being one of the most discussed on Twitter by female representatives during both the election and seven months later.Originality/value Unlike other studies on gender and issue discussion, this paper examines a new type of communication: Twitter. Tweets are split by issue type (female/male) and the author sees that while women do discuss “female issues” more than men, they do not exclude “male issues.” This paper also shows that women focus on “female issues” both during elections and after. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study integrates network and content analyses to examine valence-based homophily on Twitter or the tendency for individuals to interact with those expressing similar valence. During the 2012 federal election cycle, we collected Twitter conversations about 10 controversial political topics and mapped their network ties. Using network analysis, we discovered clusters—subgroups of highly self-connected users—and coded messages in each cluster for their expressed positive-to-negative emotional valence, level of support or opposition, and political leaning. We found that valence-based homophily successfully explained the selection of user interactions on Twitter, in terms of expressed emotional valence in their tweets or support versus criticism to an issue. It also finds conservative voices to be associated with negatively valenced clusters and vice versa. This study expands the theory of homophily beyond its traditional conceptualization and provides a new understanding of political-issue interactions in a social media context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We here evaluate the heterogeneous effects of newspaper endorsements of U.S. Presidential candidates in the 100 days preceding the 2008 and 2012 elections on the probability that they win the election. Our identification strategy relies on daily variations in the winning probabilities (obtained from the Intrade prediction market) and the fact that newspapers decide their endorsements weeks before their announcement. Endorsements that are classified as surprising and consistent have the largest effect. An endorsement is surprising when the newspaper has not traditionally endorsed the candidate's party. An endorsement is inconsistent when the newspaper leans ideologically to one party but endorses a candidate from another party. ( JEL L82, D7) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the 2012 French and American 'decisive' television debate(s) before Election Day. On three major points, the American and French future winners unknowingly adopted very similar debating behavior for the debates. First, both winners, Barack Obama and François Hollande, judiciously worked on their non-verbal communication, thus helping to subtly convey a sense of superiority over their rival during the debates. Second, both also mastered rhetorical skills much better than their opponents. Finally, both knew to start the debates in a very composed way, being aware of the importance of first impressions to the eye of the viewers. The article also notices the strong correlation in both countries between the televised debate and the election outcome. This probably means that the debate is at least a good way to reveal the 'strength' of the future winner in relation to his or her opponent. Finally, the article hints, again by comparing both countries, that incumbent leaders might initially have difficulties in the debates against their usually aggressive challengers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major political events now unfold in a hybrid political information cycle: even as millions of citizens tune in to television broadcasts, many also comment - and receive others' comments - over social media. In previous research, we have described how biobehavioral cues spur Twitter discussion of candidates during American presidential debates. Here we extend that research to also account for other elements of the communication environment - in particular, messages from political and media elites reaching them via a 'second screen' such as mobile phone or tablet - and we apply our analyses to debates in both the United States and France. Specifically, we examine the relationship between the Twitter posts of 300 politicians, organizations and media figures from each country and the relevant messages of the larger Twitterverse during the debates. Our findings reveal commonalities in social media response in the two countries, particularly the powerful role of party figures and pundits in spurring social media posting. We also note differences between the social media cultures of the two countries, including the finding that French elites commanded relatively more attention (in the form of retweets) than their American counterparts. Implications for debate evaluations and online expression are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study was to explore how young voters form attitudes through the socialization process (i.e., political information efficacy) and the factors that potentially shaped voting behavior in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Using political socialization as the theoretical framework, 363 respondents were surveyed the day after the election. Findings indicate that biological sex, election news, and peer communication had a direct impact on information efficacy for young voters. Information efficacy had a significant direct impact on voting behavior and a mediating effect via socialization agents. Implications for campaign planners are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relatively little research has examined the effects of campaign-led field activity in a competitive election. In this article, we leverage a unique data set containing the location of every Barack Obama and Mitt Romney field office and county-level data on the presidential vote to understand how communication with voters in the field may have affected the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. We find that the presence of Obama field offices was associated with greater Obama vote share at the county level, although we cannot detect a similar relationship for Romney field offices. We conduct additional robustness tests to address the potential limitations of these observational data. Ultimately, we conclude that even if Obama’s field organization out-performed Romney’s, the aggregate impact of Obama’s field organization was not large enough to determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The article examines how a person's online use of social networking sites (SNS) for political reasons alters their involvement in politics. It mentions a nationally representative sample was used incorporating variables such as political orientation, offline political discussions, and evaluation of online social networks, which were detected in previous research. It comments on the successful use of SNS deployment strategy by the U.S. Democratic Party in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

Voter dissatisfaction with a poor US economy during President Obama's first term in office poses the question of how he was re-elected to a second term. If Republican strategists framed the 2012 election as a referendum on the economy, then a clear disconnect between dissatisfaction and voting behavior is indicative. This article employs balance theory and the theory of framing to explore how the 2012 Obama campaign favorably persuaded voters. We argue that the Obama campaign framed economically related dimensions of happiness (e.g., income equality and employment) to increase voters' individual happiness despite the unfavorable economic climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines photographs of candidates in the 2012 presidential general election to understand how newspapers presented Obama and Romney. Significant differences existed in regard to behavior, context and perspective, but photo coverage was balanced on the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the use of policy issues within horse-race coverage of the 2012 presidential election to determine how such issues were reported in two national newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of leading newspaper endorsements in the 2012 presidential election shows newspapers framed Obama as a leader based on his performance on a variety of national issues, and newspapers that endorsed Romney framed him largely as the best candidate to fix the struggling economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying upon the results of a randomized, post-test only, control group experiment, we examine the effects of The New York Times endorsement of Barack Obama on potential voters in the 2012 presidential election (N=443). Our findings show that the Times endorsement mattered to exposed respondents. Specifically, they used the Times endorsement as a candidate evaluation cue in the real world. Different respondents, however, responded to the Times endorsement cue differently. Those who viewed the Times favorably accepted the endorsement and evaluated President Obama more positively and Mitt Romney more negatively after viewing it. Conversely, respondents who viewed the Times unfavorably rejected the endorsement and evaluated President Obama more negatively and Mitt Romney more positively after viewing it. In more general terms, our findings show that even in information-saturated, highly salient election campaigns, voters rely to some extent on shortcuts and cues when they evaluate candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory, mixed-methods study uses data gathered during the previous U.S. presidential election in 2012 to evaluate student political engagement and digital culture. Survey results and media diary entries revealed that college students enrolled in a media literacy course during Super Tuesday or Election Day gravitated toward low-barrier political actions and expressive modes of citizenship, and they were most engaged when there was a social component to following election news. These results, coupled with recent data on political engagement and media consumption, present an opportunity to consider the role of digital platforms and online communities in the 2016 election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]