US Senate campaigns, negative advertising, and voter mobilization in the 1998 midterm election [An article from: Electoral Studies]

This digital document is a journal article from Electoral Studies, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
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.