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ABSTRACTPresidential candidates frequently hold campaign events on college and university campuses. Yet, the frequency of and motivations for holding these events on-campus has not been subject to systematic empirical analysis. This article analyzes an original database of presidential campaign visits in 2016 to determine how often and why the candidates held their events on-campus. I find that colleges and universities hosted more campaign visits (16.9%) than any other type of venue in 2016. Also, the Democratic candidates apparently used these visits to mobilize young people to register and vote. Democrats (29.5%) visited campuses far more often than Republicans (8.2%), and—unlike Republicans—Democrats were significantly more likely to hold events on-campus, instead of at another venue, as the host-state's voter registration deadline, its early voting period, or Election Day neared. This research informs scholars' understanding of the role that young people, as well as colleges and universities, play in American electoral politics.

Hillary Clinton's failure to visit the key battleground state of Wisconsin in 2016 has become a popular metaphor for the alleged strategic inadequacies of her presidential campaign. Critics who cite this fact, however, make two important assumptions: that campaign visits are effective, in general, and that they were effective for Clinton in 2016. I test these assumptions using an original database of presidential and vice presidential campaign visits in 2016. Specifically, I regress party vote share on each candidate's number of campaign visits, at the county level, first for all counties located within battleground states, and then for counties located within each of six key battleground states: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The results of this analysis do not clearly support either of the assumptions made by Clinton's critics. In general, none of the presidential or vice presidential candidates – including Clinton – significantly influenced voting via campaign visits. However, Clinton is one of only two candidates – along with Mike Pence, in Ohio – whose campaign visits had a significant effect on voting in an individual state. Specifically, Clinton's visits to Pennsylvania improved the Democratic ticket's performance in that state by 1.2 percentage points. Also, there is weak evidence to suggest that Clinton might have had a similar effect on voting in Michigan. It is unclear from this evidence whether Clinton also would have gained votes, or even won, in Wisconsin had she campaigned in that state. But two conclusions are clear. First, Clinton's visits to Democratic-leaning battleground states did not have the "backfiring" effect that her campaign reportedly feared. Second, Donald Trump did not win in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin as a direct result of his campaign visits to those decisive states.

Ideology's crucial theoretical and empirical role in explaining political behavior makes it imperative that scholars understand how individuals conceptualize and apply ideological labels. The existing literature on this topic is quite limited, however, because it relies almost exclusively upon data from the 1970s and 1980s, and it does not examine how psychological factors influence conceptualizations of ideological labels. This article uses data from two original laboratory experiments to test the relative impact of four major policy dimensions on participants' evaluations of candidate ideology and to test authoritarianism's role in shaping ideological conceptualization. These analyses indicate that individuals most often define liberalism and conservatism primarily in terms of social policies closely associated with religious values, each of which invert traditional ideological orientations toward the appropriate size and role of government. The causal mechanism shaping this relationship is authoritarianism, because, I argue, the religious social policy dimension most clearly evokes the deep‐seated value conflicts associated with an authoritarian view of political conflict.