Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Running on the Brand

这个项目调查了美国立法候选人在竞选中作为集体政党组织的战略成员所做的选择。推动这个项目的核心问题是：国会候选人在选举时是支持还是离开他们的政党？为了解决这个问题，该项目旨在填补现有政治学研究中的三个主要空白。首先，由于缺乏历史广告数据，我们对候选人在竞选中通常提出的问题和声明所知相对较少，特别是在2000年之前的选举中。其次，我们对政党在这些选举中所起的作用以及随着时间的推移这种作用的变化的了解有限。最后，国会组织中最广泛持有的党派观点是基于一个基本未经检验的假设，即政党候选人的选举前景与政党的命运密切相关。在国会的声誉。根据这一观点，候选人在制定竞选策略以应对好与坏的党派选举波动方面的能力有限。然而，目前还没有系统的分析来评估这一基本假设，或探索候选人实际发出的信息。本项目将研究过去四十年来候选人在广告中直接传达的战略声明。主要的研究任务将是对俄克拉何马大学朱利安·p·坎特政治商业档案馆保存的8万多份广播和电视国会广告的内容进行编码和分析。这些广告将通过传统和计算机自动化方法相结合的方式进行审查，以评估候选人提出的问题的种类，他们对政党和政党领导人的形象和参考的类型，以及他们在不同时间和不同地区发表明确、模糊或不一致言论的频率。该研究还将评估随着各政党在意识形态上变得更加极端和统一，各政党内部在类似的选举信息上表现出的协调程度。该项目还将进行调查实验，旨在解决党派候选人策略的行为基础，以及这些策略可能与选民可获得的信息联系起来的方式。该项目将做出几项更广泛的贡献。该项目收集的竞选数据将对多个领域的学者感兴趣，包括媒体和传播、社会和公共政策、经济学和政治学。在这个项目中开发和使用的基于计算机的编码方法可以在语言学和法律奖学金等领域找到更多的应用。该项目的数据集和发现将揭示当代美国政治的一系列重要方面，并可能被证明是教师、记者和政策制定者的资源。

This project investigates the choices that US legislative candidates make in their campaigns as strategic members of a collective party organization. The central question motivating the project is: When do congressional candidates run with or away from their party at election time?In addressing this question, the project aims to fill three major gaps in extant political science research. First, due to the lack of historical advertising data, we know relatively little about the kinds of issues and statements candidates typically raise in their campaigns, especially for elections prior to 2000. Second, we have only a limited understanding of the role that parties play in these elections and of change over time in that role. Finally, the most widely held view of parties in congressional organization is based on the largely untested assumption that the electoral prospects of party candidates are strongly linked to the fates of the parties? reputations in Congress. According to this view, candidates have a restricted ability to develop campaign strategies to deal with good and bad partisan election swings. Yet no systematic analysis is available to appraise this fundamental assumption or to explore the messages actually issued by candidates.This project will examine the strategic statements communicated directly by candidates in their advertisements over the last forty years. The primary research task will be to code and analyze the content of the over 80,000 radio and television congressional ads housed at the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive, at the University of Oklahoma. The ads will be examined through a combination of traditional and computer-automated approaches, in order to assess the kinds of issues the candidates raise, the sorts of images and references they make about the parties and party leaders, and the frequency with which they make clear, ambiguous, or inconsistent statements over time and across districts. The research will also evaluate the level of coordination that is exhibited within parties on similar election messages as each party grows more ideologically extreme and unified. The project will also conduct survey experiments aimed at addressing the behavioral foundations of partisan candidate strategies and the ways that those strategies might be linked to the information available to voters. The project will make several broader contributions. The campaign data collected in the project will be of interest to scholars in multiple areas, including media and communication, social and public policy, economics, and political science. The computer-based coding method developed and used in this project could find additional application in such fields as linguistics and legal scholarship. The datasets and findings from the project will shed light on a range of important aspects of contemporary US politics, and may prove to be a resource for teachers, journalists, and policy-makers.