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Campaign persuasion operates with notable consistency across political parties, message tone, and information environment., Evidence across social science indicates that average effects of persuasive messages are small. One commonly offered explanation for these small effects is heterogeneity: Persuasion may only work well in specific circumstances. To evaluate heterogeneity, we repeated an experiment weekly in real time using 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign advertisements. We tested 49 political advertisements in 59 unique experiments on 34,000 people. We investigate heterogeneous effects by sender (candidates or groups), receiver (subject partisanship), content (attack or promotional), and context (battleground versus non-battleground, primary versus general election, and early versus late). We find small average effects on candidate favorability and vote. These small effects, however, do not mask substantial heterogeneity even where theory from political science suggests that we should find it. During the primary and general election, in battleground states, for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, effects are similarly small. Heterogeneity with large offsetting effects is not the source of small average effects.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Republican primary defied the predictions of many politicians, pundits, and political scientists. Yet, while Trump’s nomination was hard to predict, it is...

Primary voters are frequently characterized as an ideologically extreme subset of their party, and thus partially responsible for party polarization in government. This study uses a combination of administrative records on primary turnout and five recent surveys from 2008–14 to show that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank-and-file voters in their party. These similarities do not vary according to the openness of the primary. These results suggest that the composition of primary electorates does not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole.

The 2016 campaign ended with a surprising and inconclusive outcome: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote comfortably but lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump. We identify three factors that help explain this outcome. First, fundamental economic and political trends favored a Democratic popular vote win. Second, the party coalitions had become more polarized by race and education during Obama’s presidency. Third, Trump’s focus on issues connected to ethnic and social identities made attitudes toward immigration and African-Americans more important in voters’ choices in 2016 than they had been in 2012.

As 2015 got underway, most Americans were poised for another Bush vs. Clinton presidential election, but by the middle of the year it was clear something unexpected was unfolding in the race for the White House. In this article, we illuminate the political landscape heading into the 2016 election, paying special attention to the public’s mood, their assessments of government, their attitudes about race and members of the other party, and the health of the nation’s economy. Fundamental predictors of election outcomes did not clearly favor either side, but an increasing ethnic diversity in the electorate, alongside a racially polarized electorate, was favorable to Democrats. Ultimately, an ambivalent electorate divided by party and race set the stage for a presidential primary that played directly on these divisions, and for a general election whose outcome initially appeared far from certain.

Technology and the decreased cost of survey research have made it possible for researchers to collect data using new and varied modes of interview. These data are often analyzed as if they were generated using similar processes, but the modes of interview may produce differences in response simply due to the presence or absence of an interviewer. In this paper, we explore the differences in item non-response that result from different modes of interview and find that mode makes a difference. The data are from an experiment in which we randomly assigned an adult population to an in-person or self-completed survey after subjects agreed to participate in a short poll. For nearly every topic and format of question, we find less item non-response in the self-complete mode. Furthermore, we find the difference across modes in non-response is exacerbated for respondents with low levels of cognitive abilities. Moving from high to low levels of cognitive ability, an otherwise average respondent can be up to six times more likely to say “don’t know” in a face-to-face interview than in a self-completed survey, depending on the type of question.

What are the most important concepts in the political behavior literature? Have experiments supplanted surveys as the dominant method in political behavior research? What role does the American National Election Studies (ANES) play in this literature? We utilize a content analysis of over 1,100 quantitative articles on American mass political behavior published between 1980 and 2009 to address these questions. We then supplement this with a second sample of articles published between 2010 and 2018. Four key takeaways are apparent. First, the agenda of this literature is heavily skewed toward understanding voting to a relative lack of attention to specific policy attitudes and other topics. Second, experiments are ascendant, but are far from displacing surveys, and particularly the ANES. Third, while important changes to this agenda have occurred over time, it remains much the same in 2018 as it was in 1980. Fourth, the centrality of the ANES seems to stem from its time-series component. In the end, we conclude that the ANES is a critical investment for the scientific community and a main driver of political behavior research.

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.

Theories of voting suggest voters use shortcuts to minimize the costs associated with becoming informed about candidates' policy positions. Although there is much theorizing about how voters use cues, there is little empirical work on whether candidates send them. Data from advertisements run during the 1998 elections show that candidates do not often send obvious kinds of policy relevant cues—information about party and ideology. This analysis of advertising suggests that candidates send signals in strategic ways. They obfuscate to avoid being labeled a partisan of the less popular party, but they know when they are not well known enough (being a challenger) such that party may help people learn about them. In open primaries, candidates attempt to steal voters away from the opposing party by not explicitly mentioning their party or ideology but by talking about specific issue positions in hopes of attracting independent voters.