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The most prominent theories of electoral participation focus on the individual-level characteristics of citizens as the primary determinants of voter turnout. However, seeking to re-incorporate "politics" into the study of electoral participation, scholars have increasingly turned their attention toward the stimulus provided by political campaigns. A major point of emphasis within this research has been whether negative campaigns mobilize or demobilize citizens. Findings thus far have been mixed. We further this line of inquiry by conducting a broad-based study of the impact of state-level campaigns on individual voter turnout. Merging media market-level measures of television campaign advertising in US Senate elections with individual-level data from the 1998 National Election Study and the Voter Supplement File of the November 1998 Current Population Survey, we find strong support for a mobilization effect. We further demonstrate that the mobilization effect of these advertising campaigns results almost entirely from the volume of negative ads aired. Our results help to clarify the role of campaigns in general, and negative campaigning in particular, in bringing voters to the polls. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]

Most examinations of the sociodemographic group foundations of political party identification and party coalitions in the United States rely on national samples (e.g., the National Election Studies). Therefore, they fail to consider (a) state-to-state variation in the group components of party identification and party coalitions and (b) how state context structures this variation. We rely on media exit polls from the 1988, 1992, and 1996 elections to examine group influences on party identification and party coalitions across the large states. Although there are common threads across the nation in Democratic and Republican support, we find significant state-to-state variation in the nature of group influences on party identification. For many sociodemographic characteristics, group size conditions the importance of the characteristic for party identification, a finding consistent with a contextual theory of political behavior. A group's size and the partisan loyalty of its members interact to determine a group's importance to coalition building in a state.

Examines the reported vote in the 1990, 1992, and 1994 National Election Studies (NES) and in the 1990 and 1992 Senate Election Studies, focusing on evidence of, and reasons for, a pro-winner misreport problem; compares results with exit poll results.

AbstractPrevious research has found strong evidence of a pro-winner vote misreport bias in the National Election Studies (NES). We extend this research by examining the reported vote for U.S. senator and governor in the 1990, 1992, and 1994 NES and in the 1990 and 1992 Senate Election Studies (SES). We find continuing evidence of a pro-winner misreport problem. In contrast, we uncover no significant pro-winner bias in state exit polls conducted by the media. We test two commonly asserted explanations of the source of this misreport bias, but find no evidence that the problem is related either to the number of days between the election and the survey interview or to incumbency. Finally, we test a model of the misreport process that suggests that less politically engaged and less politically sophisticated voters are most likely to over-report support for the winner. Our results here are mixed; we find some evidence that Independents are more likely to misreport in favor of the winner, but we find no evidence that education level affects the likelihood of misreporting.

In this article, we examine the variation in the importance of partisanship and ideology in structuring citizens' presidential vote choice across the United States. We use CBS/ New York Times Exit Polls from 18 states in 1984 and 24 states in 1988, along with the national polls from each year. Underlying national survey-based examinations of presidential voting (e.g., those based on the American National Election Studies) is the assumption that presidential voting "looks and works the same" across the United States. However, our results indicate marked variation in the influence of both partisanship and ideology on presidential vote choice across state electorates. Political characteristics of state electorates (e.g., mass polarization and mass liberalism) provide some insight into these differences. Furthermore, we discover some continuity from 1984 to 1988 within states in the nature of influences on their electorates' presidential voting.

Recent studies of the domestic distribution of military procurement expenditures & representation on congressional defense committees support the traditional committee-centered distributive theory of congressional policymaking in a manner consistent with the assumption that Congress is organized to produce gains from exchange among legislators with diverse interests via intercommittee logrolling. This paper compares the committee-centered distributive theory to a party-centered distributive theory. Analysis of a multiequation model using pooled time-series data on the distribution of military procurement expenditures & defense committee representation among states from 1963 to 1989 supports a party-centered version of the distributive theory. 3 Tables, 20 References. Adapted from the source document.