Issues and Agenda Setting

This is a page for students of PS 240. On October 20th and 24th we discussed issues and agenda setting.

Possible Exam Questions

1. Do issues really matter in political campaigns?

Readings

O.G. Abbe, Goodliffe, J., Herrnson, P. S. and Patterson, K. D. (2003). Agenda Setting in Congressional Elections: The Impact of Issues and Campaigns on Voting Behavior. Political Research Quarterly, 56, 419-430.

Summary:This article examines the credence of issues in congressional elections. The first discussion point is issue voting. The article says that in order for issue voting to occur, both candidates issue positions must be readily available to voters. however there are two reasons this is impractical, first, because candidates are consistently ambiguous about policy position, and second, because voters are horribly uninformed. The second discussion is the agenda-setting theory, which says that news coverage, campaigning, and advertising influence to importance of issues to voters. "Issue Ownership" strategy - if a candidate focuses his/her agenda on issues which are owned by their own party, favor will shift in their direction.

Basically, an effective way to run a campaign to to run it based on issues which your party owns.

S. Ansolabehere, Rodden, J. and Snyder, J.,James M. (2008). The Strength of Issues: Using Multiple Measures to Gauge Preference Stability, Ideological Constraint, and Issue Voting. American Political Science Review, 102, 215-232.

Summary: American research highly suggests that voters have largely incoherent and unstable political positions, and those positions reflect little in vote choice. This article demonstrates that the studies these findings are based on have significant errors in measurement due to their use of individual survey items. They show that averaging a large number of survey items on the same broadly defined issue area—for example, government involvement in the economy or moral issues—removes of a large amount of the measurement error. It also shows that the participants’ preferences on the issues are well structured and stable. This stability increases with the number of surveyed issues increases and can even approach the stability of party identification. Once error has been reduced, issue preferences better explain the participants’ choice for president.

C. Kenny and Jenner, E. (2008). Direction Versus Proximity in the Social Influence Process. Political Behavior, 30, 73-95.

Summary: This article focuses on the directional vs. proximity debate in evaluating the influence of discussions among voters. It finds that people evaluate the people they talk politics with and tend to be influenced more by the people that agree with them in a directional matter rather than proximity. In none of the 17 estimations did the proximity model come out on top. 11 of the 17, however, showed that the directional model was more accurate. The other six didn’t go either way.

H. Brasher (2003). Capitalizing on Contention: Issue Agendas in U.S. Senate Campaigns. Political Communication, 20, 453.

Summary: While most scholars believe that issues don’t matter in political campaigns, the parties and candidates spend an enormous amount of time developing issue platforms. This study presents a systematic review of U.S. Senate candidates’ campaign messages that assesses the impact of the parties’ agenda setting efforts during the election year session. The parties’ efforts are compared with mass media, major legislative accomplishments, and party issue ownership as alternative sources of agenda setting in campaigns. The results show that Senate candidates do emphasize certain issues in their campaigns and that the contentious election year issues and candidates’ major legislative accomplishments are the issues that the candidates are likely to discuss.

K. Dolan (2008). Running Against a Woman: Do Female Opponents Shape Male Candidate Behaviors? Social Science Quarterly (Blackwell Publishing Limited), 89, 765-779.

Summary: This study evaluates the idea that male candidates feel the need to appeal more to women voters when running against a female opponent. Using the material from campaign websites, the author examines priorities of male and female candidates running against each other. She finds, however, that men don’t feel any significant need to appeal more to women, and they typically actually give quite limited visibility to women’s issues. So she concludes that a female opponent does not significantly shape a male candidate’s behaviors.

J. Sides (2007). The Consequences of Campaign Agendas. American Politics Research, 35, 465-488.

Summary: The two dominant theories of candidate agendas are: focus on issues that your party owns or issues that are salient to the public. These imperatives can create conflict for a candidate, and the idea that they may lose votes if they ignore one or the other can create even more problems. However this article provides a systematic test using candidate advertising for 3 consecutive Congressional elections. The outcome suggests that neither theory is true, because candidates consistently emphasized neither owned issues or salient issues in any of the three elections.