Voter Mobilization in the 1998 Midterm Election: Did U.S. Senate and Gubernatorial Campaigns Get Out the Vote?

Abstract The most prominent theories of electoral participation focus on the individual-level characteristics of citizens as the primary determinants of turnout. More recently, scholars have sought to re-incorporate politics into the study of electoral participation, turning their attention specifically toward political campaigns. Findings thus far have been mixed and somewhat limited. In this paper, we further this latter line of inquiry by conducting the most broad-based study to date of the impact of state-level campaigns on individual voter turnout. Merging state-level measures of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns with individual-level data from the 1998 National Election Study and the Voter Supplement File of the November 1998 Current Population Survey, we find strong support for a mobilization effect. Employing newly available data on the TV advertising of the Senate campaigns, we further demonstrate that the mobilization effect of these advertising campaigns results almost entirely from the volume of negative ads aired. Our results help to clarify the role of campaigns in general, and negative campaigning in particular, in bringing voters to the polls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]