Campaign Strategy and Impact in Mexico and Brazil

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This investigation studies the nature and impact of campaign messages in new democracies, and generates a new dataset of campaign messages in a previously unstudied context. The Principal Investigator records and codescampaign messages and collects data on voter participation and learning from Brazil and Mexico's Presidential, Gubernatorial, and Legislative elections in 2006. The resulting dataset is used to examine the impact of, and the incentives for, negative and positive campaigning. Specifically, the researcher demonstrates how voter learning, turnout, and candidate choice are affected by campaigns tone, as well as how incentives for candidatesto go negative vary across formal and informal institutions. The resultingdataset also has utility for many other research questions and will be released into the public domain. The project leverages partnerships with universities in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico to accomplish this data-collection effort at minimal cost.This project enhances understanding of political campaignstrategy and impact in emerging democracies. Such understanding is especially important for three reasons. First, political campaigns in new democracies are in fact more important than campaigns in consolidated democracies. In emerging countries, low partisanship and low information levels mean that much of the electorate enters campaigns with limited pre-existing commitments and conceptions. The campaign information they receive and their response to it affects more voters, more dramatically than in established democracies. Second, this project helps generalize understandings of campaign strategy and impact from the US' two-party,single-member district context, to multiparty systems with alternative electoral systems.Though limited to two countries, the project will capture campaign messages from five different electoral systems involving as few as two or as many as hundreds of candidates for office, in both traditional and modern electoral environments. This variation is related to several specific hypotheses in this proposal, but also multiplies possibilities for future scholars using these resources. Third, this project comes at a unique and important moment for both Brazil and Mexico. Both countries face declining trust in government and the content and nature of campaign messages may further weaken trust or reinvigorate it through an open, democratic process. Broader Value: The study provides research opportunities for students in both the United States and Latin America, with substantial participation by underrepresented groups. The investigator creates a database that may be used by other scholars interested in the topic.