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Prior research demonstrates that many citizens are unable to perceive differences between the two major political parties. In order to investigate whether candidate behavior in campaigns contributes to this perception, we test implications about partisan constraints on campaign rhetoric drawn from the literature on parties and policy convergence. Our results suggest that candidates of different parties do not highlight the same issues or positions in their campaign advertising. We find that campaign rhetoric is strongly motivated by party even when controlling for constituency characteristics and other factors. Thus, there is convergence among candidates of the same party across districts and states and divergence between opposing candidates within districts and states. Our results are based on a detailed content analysis of more than 1,000 campaign advertisements aired by 290 candidates in 153 elections in 37 states during the 1998 midterm elections.

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.

Our findings suggest that there are systematic differences in the ways that voters use the real values of economic variables when casting a vote depending on how long they have had to learn about the true state of the economy. It is possible that in campaigns of sufficient length voters may have more time to be exposed to competing campaign messages and to learn about the true state of the economy and the true policy positions of candidates. We tested this assertion on 113 elections in thirteen democracies. The test results in a confirmation of the hypothesis. In longer campaigns, voters rely more heavily on the true values of economic conditions to inform their evaluations of parties in power. In shorter campaigns, these effects are mostly absent. Campaign length seems to matter for voter learning.

Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential election and 2006 subnational elections, but argue that our model and results are broadly applicable within the field of political communication. We find that the bulk of the persuasive impact of advertising decays quickly, but that some effect in the presidential campaign endures for at least 6 weeks. These results, which are similar in rolling cross-section survey data and county-level data on actual presidential vote, appear to reflect a mix of memory-based processing (whose effects last only as long as short-term memory lasts) and online processing (whose effects are more durable). Finally, we find that immediate effects of advertising are larger in subnational than presidential elections, but decay more quickly and more completely. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): discussion of methodological issues; results for a alternative specifications of key models; full reports of model results.]. © 2013 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This chapter explores the political implications of differences in social space. The distinction between a “local” or “global” orientation systematically affects political behavior both within and across parties. Borrowing a concept from 1950s sociology—but operationalizing it differently—this chapter demonstrates that “cosmopolitanism” affects vote choice and is not well measured by typical demographic or attitudinal controls routinely included in vote models. Further, the chapter shows that cosmopolitanism is not accounted for by mainstay geographic indicators such as the regional marker for South or non-South. Cosmopolitanism is a mix of attributes, local environment, and opportunity, and the means of taking advantage of those opportunities. But it is measured here through a series of behaviors (or self-reports of behaviors) that indicate the presence or absence of a cosmopolitan orientation.

This chapter discusses the benefits of experimentation and looks at the future of political communication research, emphasizing the previous experimental work, as well as the creative manipulations, that have been conducted using online panels. It then studies two online election studies from 2008 in order to show the properties of the data and the samples, and, finally, reveals that Internet technology is currently redefining the methodology of political communication research and improving some of the basic weaknesses of the previous methods.

tablishing contact with voters through direct mail, telephone banks, rallies and face-to-face campaigning, yet there is little systematic research about the impact of such retail poli? tics on voters. The New Hampshrre primary provides an optimal context for examining the consequences of campaign contacts because of its strong tradition of interaction between candidates and voters. Using a unique data set drawn from five surveys conducted during the 1996 New Hampshire primary, we show that candidate contact influences voters' abilities to rate candidates, as well as their information about and favor