The origins of campaign agendas

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 407-436

  Sides, John ^a  

^a GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646884625     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123406000226     Document Type: Review

References (161)

1. Charles H. Franklin, 'Eschewing Obfuscation? Campaigns and the Perception of US Senate Incumbents', American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 1193-1214, p. 1201.
2. The strategy of convergence is explicated in Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957).
3. See also Harold Hoteling, 'Stability in Competition', Economic Journal, 39 (1929), 41-57;
4. and Arthur Smithies, 'Optimum Locationin Spatial Competition', Journal of Political Economy, 49(1941), 423-9. Various factors complicate the spatial model's prediction of convergence. One is risks to the candidate's credibility
5. - see Alberto Alesina, 'Credibility and Policy Convergence in a Two-Party System with Rational Voters', American Economic Review, 78 (1988), 796-805;
6. Randall L. Calvert, 'Robustness of the Multidimensional Voting Model: Candidate Motivations, Uncertainty, and Convergence', American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 69-95;
7. William Riker, 'Heresthetic and Rhetoric in the Spatial Model', in James M. Enelow and Melvin J. Hinich, eds, Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 46-65;
8. and Donald Wittman, 'Candidate Motivation: A Synthesis of Alternatives', American Political Science Review, 77 (1985), 142-57. A second is a multi-dimensional issue space
9. -see Scott Feld, Bernard Grofman and Nicholas Miller, 'Centripetal Forces in Spatial Voting: On the Size of the Yolk', Public Choice, 59 (1988), 37-50;
10. Richard McKelvey, 'Covering, Dominance, and Institution-Free Properties of Social Choice', America Journal of Political Science, 30 (1986), 282-314;
11. and Charles R. Plott, 'A Notion of Equilibrium and Its Possibility under Majority Rule', American Economic Review, 57 (1967), 787-806.
12. A third is elections that occur in stages - see John H. Aldrich, Before the Convention: Strategies and Choices in Presidential Nomination Campaigns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
13. A fourth is imperfect information about voters' preferences - see Randall L. Calvert, 'Robustness of the Multidimensional Voting Model: Candidate Motivations, Uncertainty, and Convergence', American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 69-95;
14. and Rebecca B. Morton, 'Incomplete Information and Ideological Explanations of Platform Divergence', American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 382-92.
15. A fifth is the influence of party activists - see John H. Aldrich, 'A Downsian Spatial Model with Party Activists', American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), 974-90;
16. and Gary Miller and Norman Schofield, 'Activists and Partisan Realignments in the United States', American Political Science Review, 97 (2003), 245-60.
17. A sixth is 'valence' advantages, such as incumbency-see Stephen Ansolabehere and James M. Snyder Jr, 'Valence Politics and Equilibrium in Spatial Election Models,' Public Choice, 103 (2000), 327-36;
18. Tim Groseclose, 'A Model of Candidate Location When One Candidate Has a Valence Advantage', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 862-86;
19. and Stuart Elaine MacDonald and George Rabinowitz, 'Solving the Paradox of Nonconvergence: Valence, Position, and Direction in Democratic Polities', Electoral Studies, 17 (1998), 281-300.
20. A final factor is directional voting - see George Rabinowitz and Stuart Elaine MacDonald, 'A Directional Theory of Issue Voting', American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 93-121.
21. Thus, it is perhaps no surprise that politicians routinely fail to seek the position of the median voter - see James Adams and Samuel Merrill, III, 'Modeling Party Strategies and Policy Representation in Multiparty Elections: Why Are Strategies So Extreme?' American Journal of Political Science, 43 (1999), 765-91;
22. Stephen Ansolabehere, James M. Snyder Jr and Charles Stewart III, 'Candidate Positioning in US House Elections', American Journal of Political Science, 45 (2001), 136-59;
23. Barry C. Burden, 'Candidate Positioning in US Congressional Elections', British Journal of Political Science, 34 (2004), 211-27;
24. Robert S. Erikson and Gerald C. Wright, 'Voters, Candidates, and Issues in Congressional Elections', in Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds, Congress Reconsidered (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2001), pp. 67-96;
25. Bernard Grofman, Robert Griffin and Amihai Glazer, 'Identical Geography, Different Party: A Natural Experiment on the Magnitude of Party Differences in the U.S. Senate, 1960-84', in R. J. Johnston, F. M. Shelley and P. J. Taylor, eds, Developments in Electoral Geography (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 207-17;
26. Norman Schofield, Andrew D. Martin, Kevin M. Quinn and Andrew B. Whitford, 'Multiparty Electoral Competition in the Netherlands and Germany: A Model Based on Multinomial Probit', Public Choice, 97 (1998), 257-93;
27. and Gerald C. Wright Jr and Michael B. Berkman', 'Candidates and Policy in United States Senate Elections', American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 567-88.
28. William Riker, 'Political Theory: The Art of Heresthetics', in Ada Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1983).
29. Psychologically uncomfortable information can be explained away to reduce cognitive dissonance - see Leon Festinger, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1957). Theories of 'schematic' processing describe how existing beliefs influence perception and memory, such that we fail to remember information that would disconfirm or qualify those beliefs - see
30. Shelley E. Taylor and Jennifer Crocker, 'Schematic Bases of Social Information Processing', in E. Higgins et al., eds, Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1981).
31. Riker, 'Political Theory'.
32. Riker, 'Political Theory', p. 60.
33. For examples, see William Riker, The Art of Political Manipulation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986);
34. and William Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
35. Thomas H. Hammond and Brian D. Humes, 'The Spatial Model and Elections,' in Bernard Grofman, ed., Information, Participation, and Choice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 141-59, at p. 142.
36. See also Holly Brasher, 'Capitalizing on Contention: Issue Agendas in U.S. Senate Campaigns', Political Communication, 20 (2003), 453-71;
37. Thomas M. Carsey, Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000);
38. Amihai Glazer and Susanne Lohmann, 'Setting the Agenda: Electoral Competition, Commitment of Policy, and Issue Salience', Public Choice, 99 (1999), 377-94;
39. John G. Geer, 'Campaigns, Party Competition, and Political Advertising', in John G. Geer, ed., Politicians and Party Politics (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 186-217;
40. Melvin J. Hinich, Michael C. Munger and Scott De Marchi, 'Ideology and the Construction of Nationality: The Canadian Elections of 1993', Public Choice, 97 (1998), 401-28;
41. Stephen K. Medvic, Political Consultants in U.S. Congressional Elections (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002);
42. and Adam Simon, The Winning Message: Candidate Behavior, Campaign Discourse, and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). That a heresthetic logic matters to candidates is evident anecdotally. For example, after the 1994 California governor's race, Dick Dresner, the pollster for then-incumbent governor Pete Wilson, described a strategy of agenda control: 'If I can control the agenda and expand the number of people who are concerned about immigration or crime [Wilson's focus in this campaign], then I can change their focus from something else, whether it's the environment or education or whatever. We developed techniques to expand our audience. They worked, and the number of people concerned about these issues just kept growing'
43. (cited in Gerald C. Lubenow, ed., California Votes - The 1994 Governor's Race: An Inside Look at the Candidates and Their Campaigns by the People -who Managed Them (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1995), p. 79).
44. Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and William N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 206.
45. See also Carsey, Campaign Dynamics;
46. Richard Johnston, André Blais, Henry E. Brady and Jean Crête, Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992);
47. Kim Fridkin Kahn and Patrick J. Kenney, The Spectacle of US Senate Campaigns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999);
48. Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001);
49. Matthew Mendelsohn, 'The Media and Interpersonal Communications: The Priming of Issues, Leaders, and Party Identification', Journal of Politics, 58 (1996), 112-25;
50. Simon, The Winning Message;
51. Nicholas A. Valentino, Vincent L. Hutchings and Ismail K. White, 'Cues that Matter: How Political Ads Prime Racial Attitudes during Campaigns', American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), 75-90.
52. These studies dovetail with others that show how the news media can have a similar effect - e.g., Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder, News That Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
53. Riker, 'Political Theory: The Art of Heresthetics', p. 56.
54. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, 'Riding the Wave and Claiming Ownership over Issues: The Joint Effects of Advertising and News Coverage in Campaigns', Public Opinion Quarterly, 58 (1994), 335-57.
55. Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric. It should be noted, however, that this work was published posthumously and the editors believed Riker had not fully refined the chapter in which these principles were elaborated (fn.1, p. 99).
56. Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric, p. 106.
57. John R. Petrocik, 'Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study', American Journal of Political Science, 40 (1996), 825-50, p. 826. As these reputations accrue overtime, voters may actually develop partisan stereotypes that mitigate their ability even to notice when candidates 'trespass' on the other party's territory - see
58. Helmut Norporth and Bruce Buchanan, 'Wanted: The Education President: Issue Trespassing by Political Candidates', Public Opinion Quarterly, 56 (1992), 87-99.
59. Brasher, 'Capitalizing on Contention' ;
60. Ian Budge and Dennis J. Farlie, Explaining and Predicting Elections: Issue Effects and Party Strategies in Twenty-Three Democracies (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983);
61. Kahn and Kenney, The Spectacle of US Senate Campaigns;
62. Benjamin I. Page, Choices and Echoes in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978);
63. Petrocik, 'Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections';
64. Simon, The Winning Message;
65. Constantine J. Spiliotes and Lynn Vavreck, 'Campaign Advertising: Partisan Convergence or Divergence?' Journal of Politics, 64 (2002), 249-61. In their mathematical model of candidate strategy,
66. Hammond and Humes ('The Spatial Model and Elections') also find it unlikely that two opposing candidates would pursue exactly the same strategy.
67. Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 'Riding the Wave and Claiming Ownership over Issues'.
68. For examples of trespassing, see John G. Geer, 'Campaigns, Party Competition, and Political Advertising,' in John G. Geer, ed., Politicians and Party Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998);
69. David B. Holian, 'He's Stealing My Issues! Clinton's Crime Rhetoric and the Dynamics of Issue Ownership', Journal of Politics, 26 (2004), 95-124;
70. John R. Petrocik, William L. Benoit and Glenn J. Hansen, 'Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning, 1952-2000', Political Science Quarterly, 118 (2003), 599-626;
71. and Lee Sigelman and Emmett H. Buell Jr, 'Avoidance or Engagement? Issue Convergence in U.S. Presidential Campaigns, 1960-2000', American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 650-61. Brasher also finds that election-year salience drives campaign agendas ('Capitalizing on Contention').
72. Petrocik, 'Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections'.
73. The Lexis-Nexis search engine - which searches mainly polls conducted by the major television networks and newspapers - turned up 122 instances of questions evaluating issue ownership, excluding a general question about which party could be trusted 'to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years'. These questions covered twenty different issues. (The precise wording of these questions is available from the author.)
74. About 80 per cent of the House and Senate candidate advertisements in 1998 mentioned at least one of these issues.
75. It is interesting that during the Clinton years Democrats' advantage on health care declined. A February 1994 ABC/Washington Post poll found that 58 per cent of respondents trusted the Democrats to 'do a better job on providing affordable health care', whereas 22 per cent trusted the Republicans. But by October 1994, 46 per cent trusted Democrats and 29 per cent trusted Republicans. The 'gap' between the two parties shrank from 36 points to 17 points. The apparent reason - the failure of the Clinton health plan - demonstrates another of Petrocik's points: ownership depends on party performance and can be a short-term 'lease' ('Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections', p. 827). This trend also nicely illustrates Geer's observation that 'the reputations of the parties are not fixed'
76. ('Campaigns, Party Competition, and Political Advertising', p. 189).
77. For further discussion of party ownership and the federal budget, see Barry C. Burden and Joseph Neal Rice Sanberg, 'Budget Rhetoric in Presidential Campaigns from 1952 to 2000', Political Behavior, 25 (2003), 97-118.
78. For an account of how Democrats mitigated Republicans' traditional advantage on crime, see Holian, 'He's Stealing My Issues!'
79. This hypothesis also follows from the formal model in Simon, The Winning Message, which predicts that candidates should never discuss an issue on which they lack an advantage.
80. See, e.g., Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric,
81. and Petrocik, 'Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections'.
82. A candidate's decisions about issue emphasis might depend on what his or her opponent is emphasizing (see Hammond and Humes, 'The Spatial Model and Elections'). Because the data examined here include numerous races where both candidates advertised, an investigation of strategic interaction is possible. However, doing so entails analysing the candidates' advertising over-time, and such an analysis is beyond the scope of this article. An initial cross-sectional analysis reveals only a few significant associations between opposing candidates' advertising, suggesting that strategic interaction is not a major factor in the races examined here.
83. Patrick Sellers, 'Strategy and Background in Congressional Campaigns, ' American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 159-71, p. 159.
84. Kim Fridkin Kahn, The Political Consequences of Being a Woman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Other research on women's behaviour as legislators finds that their agendas frequently differ from men's -
85. see Michele Swers, The Difference Women Make (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002).
86. See David Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation: The Unintended Consequences of Black Majority Districts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999);
87. Carol Swain, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993);
88. and Katherine Tate, Black Faces in the Mirror: African Americans and Their Representatives in the US Congress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
89. See Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
90. E. Scott Adler, Why Congressional Reforms Fail: Reelection and the House Committee System (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
91. and E. Scott Adler and John Lapinski, 'Demand-side Theory and Congressional Committee Composition: A Constituency Characteristics Approach' .American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997), 895-918.
92. For an analysis of legislators' response to seniors citizens, see Andrea Louise Campbell, How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
93. Spiliotes and Vavreck, 'Campaign Advertising'.
94. Kahn and Kenney, The Spectacle of US Senate Campaigns.
95. See Brasher, 'Capitalizing on Contention';
96. Simon, 'The Winning Message';
97. and Sigelman and Buell, 'Avoidance or Engagement?'
98. Freedman and Goldstein ('Measuring Media Exposure and the Effects of Negative Campaign Ads', American Journal of Political Science, 43 (1999), 1189-208) were the first to demonstrate the power of this data source for political science, using it to argue that negative advertising does not depress turnout.
99. CMAG did not capture any advertisements for Senate races in five states - Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont - because there is no media market amongst the top seventy-five in any of these states.
100. It may seem surprising that a Senate candidate would not air advertisements. Eight of the nine Senate races with only one candidate advertising featured incumbents, such as John McCain, who won by large margins - an average of 35 points, as compared to 15 points in the other contested races. The remaining race was between Republican Michael Crapo and Democrat Bill Mauk in Idaho. Crapo won 71 per cent of the two-party vote and spent over $1.5 million, while Mauk spent only about $240,000, according to the Federal Elections Commission. Thus the Senate candidates who failed to advertise were simply not competitive in comparison to their well-established and better-funded opposition.
101. In the general election period, about 77 per cent of all advertising airings were from candidates. There were, of course, races in which advertising from parties and interest groups constituted a significant fraction of all the advertising, and my focus on candidates should not be construed as an attempt to downplay the significance of party or issue advertising. It is also possible that candidates might structure their agendas based on what they anticipate that other groups will do. This possibility could be investigated in future research.
102. Spiliotes and Vavreck ('Campaign Advertising') analyse a dataset that combines primary and general election advertisements. However, I feel that these two sets of advertisements are best considered separately. If candidates do move towards the 'extremes' during primaries and towards the 'centre' during the general election, then their issue agendas could change accordingly. For example, one might suspect that in the primary candidates will stick to the issues their party owns, since these will appeal to more ideological primary voters, but in the general election candidates will draw on a more varied set of issues, including even those 'owned' by the other party. This is to say, the effect of issue ownership may be stronger in primaries than in the general election. Because Louisiana does not have separate primary and general elections, I included only those races in Louisiana which mimicked general election races in that, first, they either were contested by only one major-party candidate, or, secondly, they featured a race contested by both parties where a Democratic candidate and a Republican candidate were the top vote-getters (i.e., where the main lines of competition were inter-party rather than intra-party). In this latter case, I do not examine any other Democratic or Republican candidates. This has little practical consequence, as the front-runners in each party typically aired the vast majority of advertisements in that race.
103. The National Journal's data utilized by Spiliotes and Vavreck ('Campaign Advertising') came only from competitive races. Thus those data cannot illuminate the effect of competitiveness itself.
104. Markus Prior, 'Weighted Content Analysis of Political Advertisements', Political Communication, 18 (2001), 335-45.
105. The issues listed in Table 1 typically correspond to a single code in Appendix A. In a few cases, I combined several codes under a single issue heading. 'Crime' includes the codes for crime, drugs, the death penalty and any other reference to law and order. 'Defence' includes all codes under 'defence' and 'missile defence'. Any advertisements coded as containing themes related to 'other defence, foreign policy issue' were investigated further; based on their content, they were coded as 'defence.' 'Foreign affairs' therefore includes 'foreign policy', 'Bosnia' and 'China'. 'Clinton' includes all references to Clinton, Ken Starr, Whitewater, impeachment or Paula Jones. 'Child care' includes explicit references to child care as well as any other reference to children. 'Other economic' includes any economic issue not given its own category. 'Other social' includes any social issue not given its own category. Table 1 does not include advertising related to 'personal' themes, such as a candidate's background, experience, values etc. Most extant theories of campaign agendas, such as party ownership, speak only to advertising about policy-related issues. The vast majority (82 per cent) of advertisements aired contained at least one reference to a policy-related issue.
106. These data obviously offer other modes of empirical purchase. One could, for example, make the individual advertisement the unit of analysis. However, given that the goal of this analysis is to explore candidate strategy, candidates seem the appropriate place to start. See Spiliotes and Vavreck ('Campaign Advertising') for a similar approach.
107. I do not include 'the economy' in this analysis. The relevant survey question refers generally to stewardship of the economy. However, in the 1998 advertising data, it is difficult to identify appeals that stressed the general idea of improving the economy. Typically, this goal is referenced only with regard to specific issues such as taxes, government spending, the minimum wage, jobs, poverty and trade, which each have different expectations vis-à-vis ownership theory. The catch-all 'other economic reference' category (see Appendix A) is comprised of only a handful of advertisements whose content (e.g., local economic development, protecting seniors from bankruptcy) does not centre on any one economic theme.
108. In a footnote, Spiliotes and Vavreck ('Campaign Advertising', p. 254) say that they find effects of issue ownership in forty issues (they focus on five in the text). The results in this analysis do not suggest comparable robustness.
109. Given that the dependent variable is a proportion, one possible strategy is to employ a simple logit transformation to place bounds of 0 and 1 on predicted values. However, as pointed out by one of the referees of this article, this transformation has the unfortunate consequence of accentuating differences at low levels of emphasis - e.g., the difference between proportions of 0.01 and 0.02 is 0.70 logits, while the difference between proportions of 0.20 and 0.21 is 0.06 logits. Thus, I do not transform the dependent variables in any fashion. Secondly, because these data contain opposing candidates within the same race as separate observations, these models were estimated with robust standard errors that allowed for this sort of clustering. Finally, the results presented below are also robust in seemingly unrelated regression models that assume some degree of correlation among the errors terms of these models.
110. Sellers, 'Strategy and Background in Congressional Campaigns';
111. Michael Barone and Grant Ujifisa, eds, Almanac of American Politics (New York: E. P. Dutton, 2000).
112. Initially, following Sellers, I compiled a trichotomous indicator that also captured whether the candidate's record was relatively meagre or extensive. There were, in total, a paucity of candidates with only a meagre record and so I combined these two categories.
113. The measure of Clinton's vote is the number reported in the Almanac of American Politics. The measure of the age distribution comes from the US Census Bureau (see Table 33 of the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1999). In this sample the measure ranges from 5 to 19 per cent, with a mean of 12 per cent. The measure of the number of students enrolled comes from the National Center for Education Statistics. The measure is from the fall of 1997 - as close to the election of 1998 as could be found on the NCES website - and ranges from 8 to 23 per cent, with a mean of 16 per cent.
114. Spiliotes and Vavreck ('Campaign Advertising') find less attention to issues in House races.
115. Riker, 'Political Theory'.
116. A few words about the distribution of these variables are in order. 'Unsafe seats' combines two of Cook's classifications, 'leaning' and 'toss-up'. Empirically, these two categories were not very distinct: the average margin of victory in leaning races was 12 points and in toss-up races 8 points. By contrast, the average margin of victory in safe seats was 27 points. By this measure 167 candidates ran in 'safe' races and 101 ran in 'unsafe' races. In terms of gender and race, there were 42 female candidates out of 268 in this dataset, and there were 22 non-white candidates. Finally, 133 of these candidates were incumbents, 46 were open-seat candidates, and 89 were challengers.
117. I do not model advertisements related to foreign affairs since only 140 of them aired in 1998.
118. Dummy variables for black candidates and for black or Latino candidates generated similar findings.
119. Substituting the eventual margin of victory as a measure of competitiveness generates substantively similar results.
120. In The Spectacle of US Senate Campaigns (Table 3.3, p. 63), Kahn and Kenney analyse only whether an advertisement mentions an issue, and, given their data, cannot measure the amount of time the candidates spent discussing issues.
121. I also tested for a variety of interaction effects in these models: between party and record; between party and the ideological orientation of the candidate's constituency (see Spiliotes and Vavreck, 'Campaign Advertising'); and between competitiveness and both party and candidate record. These results turned up few significant effects. I also investigated whether region of the country played any role by including a dummy variable for the South. It was significantly related to issue emphasis only once (candidates in the South gave less emphasis to the environment). I examined the role of seniority, coded as the number of Congresses in which member had served (if any). Its significant effects were few and inconsistent in sign: candidates with more seniority emphasized the deficit and health care less but emphasized crime more. This pattern of results has no obvious interpretation. Finally, I included a measure of candidate spending. It had no significant effects. In general, these alternative specifications did not reveal any new systematic influences on issue emphasis.
122. Simon, 'The Winning Message', p. 64.
123. I also investigated whether factors like candidate record and competitiveness encourage trespassing. I estimated models identical to those in Table 3, except separately for Democrats and Republicans. Models of education, the environment, health care, jobs, Medicare and Social Security in particular revealed no factor consistently associated with Republican trespassing. Models of defence and taxes revealed no factor consistently associated with Democratic trespassing. I also investigated whether candidates trespass in reaction to their opponent's advertising - e.g., if a Democratic candidate begins advertising on education, does his or her Republican opponent follow suit? Looking at the 103 races where there is advertising data for both candidates, I found little evidence that trespassing derives from 'copycat' behaviour. For example, 52 of 103 Republicans advertised about education, but only 19 of 52 did so after their Democratic opponent did. The others either advertised first (29) or were the only candidate advertising on education (14). Similar findings emerged for Democrats regarding taxes and for Republicans regarding health care, Medicare and Social Security.
124. For example, William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani examine how the framing of affirmative action has changed over time
125. - see 'The Changing Culture of Affirmative Action', in Richard D. Braungart, ed., Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 3 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1987), pp. 137-77. Shanto Iyengar examines how different frames in news stories about poverty affect the causes to which viewers attribute poverty and their support for government action to help the poor
126. (see 'Framing Responsibility for Political Issues: The Case of Poverty', Political Behavior, 12 (1990), 19-40).
127. Petrocik, 'A Theory of Issue Ownership', p. 829.
128. Holian, 'He's Stealing My Issues!' p. 99.
129. One might ask whether issue trespassing is merely a manifestation of convergence to the median voter. While it is true that a Republican who is talking about education could be expressing the preference of the median voter, the logic of convergence itself cannot explain why the Republican would emphasize education as opposed to some other issue on which his or her position is both close to the median voter's and on which the Republican party has an ownership advantage.
130. Page, Choices and Echoes;
131. and Kenneth A. Shepsle, 'The Strategy of Ambiguity: Uncertainty and Electoral Competition', American Political Science Review, 66 (1972), 555-68.
132. Page, Choices and Echoes;
133. and Donald P. Stokes, 'Valence Politics', in Dennis Kavanagh, ed., Electoral Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 141-64.
134. Holian, 'He's Stealing My Issues!'
135. As Figure 1 demonstrates, Clinton's efforts appear to have helped negate Republicans' advantage on crime.
136. I do not present an analysis of Medicare. In 1998, both party's advertising was entirely focused on vague promises to protect Medicare.
137. See George Thomas Kurian, Supplement to the Encyclopedia of the Democratic Party (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2001).
138. See George Thomas Kurian, Supplement to the Encyclopedia of the Republican Party (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2001).
139. Geer, 'Assessing Attack Advertising';
140. Stokes, 'Valence Politics'.
141. Valence advertisements were also coded for any references made to the opponent's position.
142. An example of a 'valence' advertisement about education comes from Congressman Bob Riley (R-AL). Sitting among young children in a classroom, he said, 'I want to see an educational system in Alabama second to none. These kids deserve the best we can give them.'
143. Somewhat surprisingly, very few advertisements from either party mentioned school vouchers or even the broader notion of parent choice.
144. Typically, this would entail statements like these in an advertisement for Senate candidate Jim Bunning (R-KY): 'A national leader fighting for Social Security ..."What we ought to do is secure our Social Security system" '.
145. In general, the prominence of valence themes in advertising corresponds to the findings of Geer ('Assessing Attack Advertising'),
146. Page (Choices and Echoes'),
147. and Spiliotes and Vavreck ('Campaign Advertising').
148. Kenneth Goldstein, Michael Franz and Travis Ridout, 'Political Advertising in 2000', Combined file [dataset], final release (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University, 2002);
149. and Kenneth Goldstein and Joel Rivlin, 'Political Advertising in 2002', Combined file [dataset], final release (Madison: The Wisconsin Advertising Project, The Department of Political Science at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005).
150. In a Harris Poll of July 2000, the public's 'most important issues' were virtually the same as in 1998: education (18 per cent), health care (14 per cent), Social Security (13 per cent), crime (11 per cent), taxes (10 per cent).
151. When asked 'What do you think are the two most important issues for the government to address?' 37 per cent of the public listed the economy or jobs and 45 per cent listed terrorism, national security or homeland security. Issues salient in 1998-2000 were less salient in 2002 - e.g., education (8 per cent), health care (10 per cent), taxes (5 per cent) and Social Security (4 per cent).
152. In Table 5, the category 'health care' includes references both to health care and to prescription drugs. 'Foreign affairs' includes references to foreign policy, foreign aid, the Middle East, China and Afghanistan.
153. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, p. 135.
154. Simon, The Winning Message, p. 25. One such lament is that of
155. Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee (Voting, p. 236): 'The opposing candidates tended to "talk past each other" almost as if they were participating in two different elections'.
156. See Brasher ('Capitalizing on Contention')
157. and Sigelman and Buell ('Avoidance or Engagement?') for similar findings in Senate and presidential elections, respectively.
158. Hammond and Humes, 'The Spatial Model and Elections'.
159. Donald E. Stokes, 'Spatial Models of Party Competition', American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 368-77.
160. Helmut Norporth and Bruce Buchanan, 'Wanted: The Education President: Issue Trespassing by Political Candidates', Public Opinion Quarterly, 56 (1992), 87-99;
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