After receiving my doctorate from New York University’s Department of Politics earlier this year, I recently joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University as a postdoctoral research fellow.
My dissertation explores the dynamics of modern political campaigns, particularly the choice by candidates of whether and how to discuss particular policy issues and the resulting effects on voters. In contrast to existing theories of issue emphasis which strive to explain why competing candidates’ issue agendas may differ, I focus on the larger unanswered question of why these agendas so often overlap.
The answer I provide is that when competing candidates discuss the same issues, one or both is calculating that there is more to be gained by improving one’s standing on that issue than by trying to change the subject. While most previous studies of campaigns center around issue-priming strategies, my analyses provide strong evidence that candidates also:
- provide information to educate or mislead voters about their issue positions and qualifications, as well as those of their opponents
- persuade voters to change their policy preferences, beyond simply providing partisan cues
- reframe issues to focus voters’ attentions on aspects most favorable to the candidate
I go on to show that candidates employ these strategies to take advantage of opportunities created by their own characteristics and the conditions of public opinion. In each case, these findings represent valuable contributions to the literature on campaigns and voters, demonstrating strategies and effects long suspected but rarely substantiated with real data. Through the use of original survey and experimental data, hand-coded records of campaign websites, and innovative methods of analysis, my dissertation refutes the conventional wisdom about how voters evaluate candidates, how these views can be shaped by campaigns, and how candidates choose their issue emphasis strategies.
I am also involved in several coauthored projects with colleagues at NYU and elsewhere, including Jonathan Nagler, Joshua Tucker, Jan Leighley, and Ted Brader. Topics addressed in these projects include the effects of social and issue-based cross-pressures on voter behavior, the impacts of negative advertising on candidate evaluations, and the role of political sophistication in predicting voter turnout.