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| WHAT DID THE LEADING CANDIDATES SAY, AND DID IT MATTER? ABSTRACT: The Annenberg 2000 study of the primaries found that voters learned the issue distinctions stressed by the candidates and that these distinctions influenced votes. The study also found that those in heavily contested primaries learned more than did voters in states with less contact with the candidates and their campaigns. IN the book Everything You Think You Know About Politics--and Why You're Wrong (Jamieson 2000), researchers from the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania argue that voters learn from campaigns and that campaigns matter. They matter because, during campaigns, the public comes to learn important information about the candidates and about their priorities. Campaigns also matter because, contrary to conventional wisdom, presidential candidates who are elected make an aggressive effort to keep most of their promises most of the time. As a result, the issues that they advance as the most serious in a campaign are the ones on which they are most likely to act once they are elected. It is therefore consequential that some issues and not others are the focus of a campaign. As a result, we learn about those that are the focus, and the candidates commit to address them if elected. When issues are not addressed, the likelihood that they will be addressed once a candidate becomes president drops pretty dramatically. We will argue that the focal issues were different within and between parties, that the electorate learned about those issues on which the candidates focused, and that that learning shaped some voting decisions. To make that case, we will report the results of our content analysis of every claim made by a presidential contender in a televised debate during the 2000 primaries as well as every statement in a presidential candidate's televised ads. We picked those two forms of discourse on the assumption that, although they certainly matter, most people do not actually hear candidates' speeches. We use ads and debates as a rough indicator of the candidates' priorities and of the information about the campaign to which voters were likely to have been exposed. We also will present results from our rolling cross-sectional survey of 30,000 voters. We began surveying in mid-November 1999. This survey report concludes just after Super Tuesday. By the time we finish in early 2001, we will have talked with 100,000 voters. We are trying to find out what they learn, how they learn it, why they vote, and the impact of all of this on their sense of governance. The survey is in the field every day. On each day, we are talking to at least 50 voters. On some days, we are talking to as many as 500. That, of course, poses a problem when we are expected to report a standard error. When we are looking at a rolling average across seven days, the error is about plus or minus 3 percent. When we are looking at all 30,000 voters, it is minuscule. We analyzed all the claims that candidates made in 13 Republican debates and 8 Democratic debates and also in 92 campaign advertisements. Each claim was coded into 1 of 35 issue categories. RESULTS We found that the parties differed in their emphasis on issues, with Republicans more likely to focus on taxes and foreign policy, and Democratic candidates more likely to focus on health care. The Republicans were also more likely to spend time attacking Gore than the Democratic candidates were to spend time attacking any of the Republican candidates. Within a party, we found that the candidates also had different issue priorities. George W. Bush's first issue was taxes, and, while John McCain discussed taxes, he emphasized it fourth. McCain's first issue was campaign finance, which Bush placed fourth on his agenda. Bill Bradley and Al Gore also placed different priorities on campaign finance, with Bradley discussing it first and Gore emphasizing it fourth. Taxes constituted the issue discussed most frequently by Governor Bush, accounting for 13 percent of his claims in debates and 31 percent in ads. The most frequent claim by Governor Bush on this issue was that tax cuts encourage economic growth. He also referred to his own record, claiming that he had enacted the largest tax cut in the history of the state of Texas. He made a more specific claim about this cut, saying it created more than $3 billion in tax relief for taxpayers in his state. John McCain emphasized campaign finance as his top issue. The claim he made most often was that when he is president, there will be a controlling authority regarding campaign finance. This referred to a statement that Gore had made about there being no controlling legal authority in 1996. McCain also said that we need to get government out of the hands of the special interests. Third, he argued that the real scandal in Washington was the debasement of every institution of government by the Clinton-Gore administration. Al Gore's most frequently occurring category was race relations. Within that category, his top three claims were, first, "I support affirmative action"; second, "We need to enforce civil rights laws"; and third, "I would issue an executive order to ban racial profiling." Bill Bradley was more thematic than the other candidates. He devoted comparable attention to his top three issues, speaking about both campaign finance and race relations 12 percent of the time, and health care 11 percent of the time. His top claims concerning campaign finance were that the people had lost faith in government because of big money or, alternatively, that money was corrupting democracy. He also supported the banning of soft money and argued that special-interest lobbyists and the rich control Washington, D.C. In the area of race relations, he argued for a need to promote racial healing, attacked Gore over his past support for tax-exempt status for racially segregated schools, and argued against racial profiling. On the topic of health care, he rebutted what he viewed as Gore's mischaracterization of his per person expenditures on Medicaid, supported universal access to affordable quality health care, and offered a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens. When we consider responses to survey questions about specific issues addressed in the campaign, we learn that citizens did in fact learn things about where the candidates stood on the issues they emphasized. For instance, Senator Bradley's support for a universal health care plan was something that substantial numbers of the residents of Super Tuesday states, among others, learned over the first two months of 2000. A large number of people learned about Vice President Gore's opposition to school vouchers over the same period. On the Republican side, some learned about Governor Bush's opposition to a total ban on soft money, and many learned about Senator McCain's support for such a ban. The information that people picked up over the course of the campaign made a difference in the votes they cast in primaries. The South Carolina primary is illustrative. In that state, a substantial number were persuaded over the course of the two weeks between the New Hampshire primary and the South Carolina primary that Governor Bush would cut taxes more than Senator McCain would. Those who regarded taxes as a serious problem moved toward Governor Bush over that period, while those who regarded taxes as a less serious problem remained loyal to Senator McCain. In South Carolina, Governor Bush's campaign was able to control the agenda, and that control was consequential. In sum, consistent with the argument that we made in Everything You Think You Know About Politics--and Why You're Wrong (Jamieson 2000), campaigns do matter. Whether a campaign happens in a voter's own state or not, whether it is a contested primary or not, makes a difference in what a voter learns. That effect is unsurprising on the face of it. What is surprising to us is that, given the intense campaigning in Iowa, the effect did not appear there. This raises the possibility that caucuses behave differently from primaries in the amount of learning that they are able to engender in audiences. This conclusion also implies that by front-loading the primaries this year in adaptation to the needs of the party and the candidates who do not want to be contesting on the eve of their conventions, a disservice may have been done to voters in states that did not have a contested primary. HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS Our profile is of a nation of haves and have-nots. The haves, who were voters in the contested primary states, minus Iowa, learned. They learned in all of our categories of knowledge. Those in the noncontested states did not learn much. As we enter the general election, essentially two different potential electorates exist: one is more or less up to speed on the basic issue distinctions, and the other has not learned a great deal yet about the important policy priorities of the two major parties' presumed nominees. In short, campaigns matter, communication matters, and it matters when voters do not get either. By front-loading the primaries and by featuring one so-called national primary on Super Tuesday, we signaled some people that they were in the process, and we signaled others that they were out of it. We also saw through our content analysis that the candidates' issue agendas differed within and between parties and that in the contested primary states, minus the Iowa caucus, people learned those issue distinctions. In other words, learning not only occurred, but it occurred on the topics that the candidates featured. As important, we have evidence that learning shaped voting. Reference Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. 2000. Everything You Think You Know About Politics--and Why You're Wrong. New York: Basic Books, New Republic Books. By Kathleen Hall Jamieson; Michael G. Hagen; Dan Orr; Lesley Sillaman; Suzanne Morse and Kim Kirn Kathleen Hall Jamieson is professor of communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author or coauthor often books including Everything You Think You Know About Politics--and Why You're Wrong; Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction and Democracy; Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership; Packaging the Presidency; and Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good. Michael G. Hagen is a senior research investigator in the Annenberg 2000 study. Dan Orr, Lesley Sillaman, Suzanne Morse, and Kim Kirn are graduate students in the Annenberg School, specializing in political communication. Copyright of Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science is the property of The American Academy of Political & Social Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science, Nov2000, Vol. 575, p12, 5p. Item Number: 3687410  InteRealEstates Coactive Tip-Money Campaign Reform Act Coalition "Equal Campaign Rights Amendment" Speeches Protest Demonstration Platforms |
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