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something more to the story of campaign effects beyond merely staging a pro-party
spectacle or running more and more advertisements.
Much of what happens in campaigns might merely be activating people’s latent
political interests or reminding them that they are Democrats or Republicans. In one of
the few studies of campaign effects to take account of content, Alan Gerber and Don
Green (2000) show that dropping leaflets and canvassing neighborhoods before local
elections increases turnout in elections by anywhere from 5 to 12 percent. They varied
the message that canvassers and leaflets delivered with little change in the results.
Regardless of whether they were reminding people of their civic duty or encouraging
them to clean up the environment, the fact that someone or something stirred up political
waters was enough to get more people to the polls.
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Presidential campaigns may work in similar ways, the actual content of them
irrelevant to the mere fact that they are happening. They may serve only as a very loud
and expensive wake-up call reminding voters that an election is coming up, the economy
is what it is, and they are members of whatever political party they like. Or, presidential
campaigns may actually help voters make decisions about who they will vote for and
what issues are the most important in their decisions. We simply do not know which of
these scenarios is more likely as the link between campaign content and voting behavior
remains under-explored.
Why Measures of Campaign Content are Needed
Without knowing what campaigns set out to do, we cannot possibly search
meaningfully for their effects. When scholars have investigated individual level
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Although the main finding of this piece is that personal contact works much better than impersonal
contact.
Convention