Capturing Campaign Effects

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments TH I S B O O K has been a long time coming—too long, we admit. In part this reBects the rush of events, most critically the rapid spread of the very studies this book is intended to encourage. The editors got caught up in this happy evolution, as did several of the contributors. For the same reason, the introductory chapter seemed in a race against time: no sooner did we Anish a draft than new studies demanded recognition and discussion. But we Anally declared editorial closure, and here the book is. With the knife-edge results of recent American campaigns and the growing evidence that campaigns matter a lot, capturing campaign effects seems even more important to us than when we began this project. These effects are still more fugitive than we would like, but we believe that this book provides a Aeld guide to those intent on identifying and pinning them down so that we can better understand and even improve political campaigns. The book began life as a colloquium on campaign studies at the magniAcent Green College, a graduate foundation in the University of British Columbia (UBC). Somehow, the participants resisted the distraction of the setting. The participants included not just the contributors to this volume but several UBC colleagues and students and others. Notable among these were John Zaller of UCLA, who gave us an early look at his work on media dynamics, and Kathleen Jamieson and Joe Capella of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who had much to say about the media backdrop to campaigns. In a sense, the Green College colloquium was also the genesis of the National Annenberg Election Study. We acknowledge the help of the college and of its principal at the time, Richard Ericson, who turned the facility over to us virtually free of charge. Most of the bills were paid by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, under its small-conference grant program. Priceless administrative support was given at the Berkeley end by Lynn Civitello and at the Vancouver end by Dory Urbano. At Berkeley, the Survey Research Center and the Department of Political Science generously supported Henry Brady’s research, and at UBC, the Department of Political Science provided the same generous support for Richard Johnston’s work. It goes without saying that none of these persons or institutions bears any responsibility for errors or omissions in this volume. Three graduate students were critical to logistics: Stuart Soroka, now at McGill University, took care of ground arrangements in Vancouver; John Sides, now at George Washington University, kept us abreast of subsequent developments in the literature as well as grounded the enterprise deeply in the older literature on campaigns and elections, to the point that the only honest choice left to us was to make him a coauthor of the introductory chapter; and Julia Lockhart reduced the diversity—some would say, perversity —in presentation formats to meet the standards of the University of Michigan Press. The press has been unfailingly patient. The gestation of this book has taken us through three editors, Chuck Myers, Jeremy Shine, and Jim Reische. The greatest leap of faith was required of Jim, and we are deeply grateful for it. We trust that the volume vindicates that faith. We also thank the patient and attentive reviewers, who should recognize their handiwork in the ultimate product. Once again, we thank our families. Each family seems to have acquired a certain fatalism about the manic and peripatetic nature of its respective husband and father. Each of us has camped out in the other’s basement and bored the host family with political science arcana. Each of us extended trips designed for other purposes to stage furtive editorial meetings in hotel rooms. These years were tough ones for both of our families, and our editorial preoccupations only increased the burden on them. It may be small consolation that we believed in the editorial enterprise all along and that, at last, we have delivered the goods. Henry E. Brady Richard Johnston Berkeley, California Vancouver, British Columbia x Acknowledgments ...