Electoral campaigns are a defining feature of democratic polities. Yet, scholarship on electoral campaigns, particularly on the content of campaign communications, remains disjointed. In recent work, the investigators offer a theory of U.S. congressional campaign communications that brings together several distinct literatures (e.g., work on negative campaigns, candidate image, position taking). They tested the theory with data from content analyses of 736 candidates? campaign websites from 2002 through 2006.
With the support of a National Science Foundation grant (SES-0822819 and SES-0822782), the investigators extended their data during the 2008 congressional campaign. With the current project, they extend their data collection to the 2010 campaign. As before, they code sites over the course of the campaign, archive sites, and implement a survey of website designers. Unlike past efforts-and in response to the interest the data has generated-the investigators explicitly solicited input on the coding scheme. Moreover, they significantly broadened the project by exploring the consequences of campaigns. They implemented experimental studies of how campaign strategies influence voters, and coded official congressional websites to explore their responsiveness (i.e. the extent to which officeholders live up to the promises they make during campaigns). In the end, the investigators constructed a publicly available data set that includes coding of nearly 1,600 House and Senate campaign websites and more than 160 official congressional websites, over nine points in time (i.e., 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010 for the campaign data and 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009 for the official sites). These data include extensive information on each candidate's background, district, and campaign as well as data on television advertisements and media coverage. Furthermore, the investigators will collect experimental data on campaign effects on voters and survey data that capture the motivations of website designers.
In addition to enabling scholars to track the evolution of the Internet over time, the data offer researchers a unique opportunity to test theories of campaigns and their effects on voters and representatives. Unlike other unmediated sources of campaign communication-such as television advertisements and debates-virtually all candidates launch campaign websites and all representatives have official websites. This allows for analyses on a representative sample of candidates and representatives, rather than a sample biased towards competitive, well-funded campaigns (as is the case with advertisements, media coverage) or certain representatives. Websites also enable politicians to present a holistic picture of their behaviors rather than short soundbites or selected roll call votes.
The project has clear intellectual merit and offers many contributions to broad societal knowledge. The collection of new data can be used to significantly extend an understanding of political campaigns, voter decision-making, and representation. It will enable researchers beyond the investigators to test theories of campaigns on a new medium, with a representative sample of congressional races. An enhanced understanding of campaigns and their effects on voters can ultimately be used as a basis for reforms that could improve campaign quality. The project also will increase individuals' abilities to evaluate the connections between campaign behaviors and subsequent actions taken by elected representatives. Additionally, the data will enable scholars and pundits to make informed statements about how campaigns work on the Web. With each election cycle, more and more journalists and pundits comment on Web campaigning; however, the lack of systematic study means that there is no way to evaluate these comments or construct broad statements about the Web (and how it compares to other media and evolves over time). Finally, the project will involve students who will learn how to conduct research and be able to use the data in their own work. In the end, the project uniquely brings together data on three key components of democratic polities: campaigns, voting, and representation.
In this project, we coded 100s of campaign website, conducted surveys of web designers and gathered an enormous amount of data on congressional campaigns. The result is an unprecedented data set on congressional campaign behavior that has already been used by over a dozen other scholars. It will provide insight into how campaigns work and eventually how campaigns connect to responsiveness and affect voters. Our main finding is that web technologies are not widely employed and candidate status (e.g., incumbency) may be the key variable in explaining campaign behavior (controlling for dozens of other dynamics). We also find funds raised and competition matter but to a lesser extent. Perhaps most important is that the candidates most likely to win office (i.e., incumbents) avoid interactions (via the web) with voters and thus the thought of the web allowing for a deliberative campaign and representative environment is not occurring. Our project also included many students who learned about research, content analysis, and campaign behavior. Many of them in fact used the data themselves to write papers, theses, and dissertations. This has been invaluable experience for these students going forward and several have gone on to graduate school. The project thus benefits the public, students, and researchers.
