This research involves a comparative investigation of the effects of campaign information on voting in elections for the U.S. House, Senate, and Presidency. More specifically, it will examine how differences in the information generated in these different elections, in combination with voter differences in partisan values and in political attentiveness, account for differences in both individual-level voting patterns and aggregate level election outcomes. The central theoretical idea is that voters who are more attentive to politics are more heavily exposed to campaign information, but that different voters encounter different campaign messages, depending on the relative intensity of the opposing campaigns. The major purpose of the project is to investigate the effects of differences in campaign intensity across and within different types of elections. The researchers are particularly interested in the effects of differences in information flow between campaign and non-campaign periods, the effects of changes over the past 40 years in the amount of information reaching voters, and the effects of different kinds of information on different kinds of voters. The researchers expect to be able to accommodate these various effects within a framework that explicitly models the diffusion of two competing and highly variable information flows (one for each candidate) through an electorate in which voters vary greatly in their political values and political attentiveness. The project, based on National Election Studies data, develops models of how changes in the flow of campaign information from 1952 to the present have affected different types of voters and elections.
