What is the role of campaigns on electoral behavior?
Please answer the below questions using any source if need be: 1) What is the role of campaigns on electoral behavior? 2) Do the same factors that explain turnout explain
What is the role of campaigns on electoral behavior?
Please answer the below questions using any source if need be:
1) What is the role of campaigns on electoral behavior?
2) Do the same factors that explain turnout explain protest behavior?
Using a half page per question.
More Details:
Candidates, parties, individuals, and nonparty organizations spent more than $8 billion on federal election campaigns during the 2011–2012 cycle; with state and local campaigns costing an additional $2.8 billion, total recorded spending on the 2012 campaigns approached $11 billion (Federal Election Commission 2013, National Institute on Money in State Politics 2014).
The countless hours donated by campaign volunteers and other extensive campaign activities not covered by reporting requirements also confirm that, in addition to presumably astute political elites and their wealthy allies, millions of ordinary Americans do not doubt that campaigns matter.
They are right: Several generations of empirical research confirm that campaigns do in fact matter—at least some of the time.
The “minimal effects” thesis that initially inspired much of this research has not survived it. The question is not whether campaigns matter, but where, when, for what, and for whom they matter.
Also, in this essay, I review how these questions have been addressed and, to some extent, answered by political and other social scientists in recent years.
In addition, my discussion is confined to election campaigns in the United States, necessarily leaving aside the extensive and vibrant body of research on elections elsewhere for lack of both space and adequate familiarity with this literature.
As essential components of democratic politics, election campaigns attract attention from scholars across the social sciences as well as from journalists, memoirists, and historians.
Lastly, the data and methods employed to study political campaigns and their consequences are remarkably eclectic.