Summary
While scholars disagree about whether and how much campaigns persuade voters, they increasingly agree that campaigns inform voters about the candidates and help voters bring their votes in line with their interests. Some argue that campaigns serve mostly to help voters bring their chokes in line with preexisting political predispositions. This paper examines the crystallization of voter preferences during the 2008 presidential election campaign. The authors rely on polls from each month of the election year campaign to assess whether and how the structure of vote choice changed. The results show that certain election day predictors of the vote-especially party identification-became increasingly important predictors of preferences during the election cycle. Even the increase in party effects is mostly confined to the period leading up to the party conventions, well before the general election campaign even began. The structure of preferences evolved over the course of the long campaign.
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Extract
The Crystallization of Voter Preferences During the 2008 Presidential Campaign
(ProQuest: ... denotes formula omitted.)
Even as the media dwell on - and speculate about the potential impact of - the many events that unfold daily during the course of presidential election campaigns, certain fundamental variables powerfully structure the election day vote. At the individual level, party identification is of great importance, increasingly so in recent years (Bartels 2000). l Other factors also matter at the individual level, including socioeconomic class and issue positions. Short-term forces such as economic conditions also shape the vote. On election day, voters tend to line up as political scientists predict they will.To a growing number of scholars, the primary function of election campaigns is to deliver the so-called fundamentals (Andersen, Tilley, and Heath, 2005; Arceneaux 2005; Finkel 1993; Gelman and King 1993; Stevenson and Vavreck 2000; for a more nuanced view, see Vavreck 2009). Finkel (1993) shows that much of the change in presidential vote preference during the 1980 campaign was attributable to "activation" of political pre...See the full content of this document
(Copyright 2011)
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