Campaign Dynamics: The Race for Governor

Chapter 10. Conclusions

CHAPTER 10 Conclusions I began this book by suggesting that political science needs a new way of think ing about electoral politics.The subsequent chapters developed and tested a theory of electoral politics that places the campaign itself more squarely at the cen ter of the electoral process. I conclude in this chapter by suggesting more generally the advances made by this study , a broader set of implications suggested by its findings, and a consideration of its limitations with an eye towar future research. The evidence presented in this book supports the conclusion that campaigns affect elections by altering the salience of particular issues or cleavages among voters. Campaigns produce heresthetic change.They do so because the campaign process is a learning process for voters.Voters respond to the choices presented to them, and the candidates’ campaigns help to define the nature o those choices. Campaigns provide voters with information about the candidates , and this research shows that voters respond to that information. Thus, campaigns produce heresthetic change by helping to shape the informational context in which voters find themselves Viewed from this perspective, the strategies and themes adopted by candidates during their campaigns do not have a direct ef fect on voting behavior. Rather, their effect comes from how campaign themes interact with preexisting divisions among voters on sociodemographic characteristics, evaluations of the president, or even specific issue positions.Thus, any model of electoral politics hoping to capture the influence of campaign themes on voting behavior mus be sensitive to this interactive ef fect. Heresthetic change means changing the shape of the issue space of the electorate, which is exactly what campaigns are designed to do. Campaigns alter the pattern of factors that best predict voting behavior in any particular election by changing their relative salience to voters. The theory developed and tested in this book is well grounded in socialscience theory and the political science literature on campaigns, elections, and voting behavior. It is consistent with the spatial model of voting, and it fits th data well. Equally important is the fact that this way of thinking about electoral 168 politics conforms nicely to the understanding of the process expressed by its practitioners. Not surprisingly, during the hours of interviews with campaign staff members and party of ficials, they never uttered the phrase “herestheti change in the electorate”; it also did not appear in any of the thousands of newspaper articles read as part of this research. However, the case studies in particular make clear that campaign strategy is designed to produce exactly the kind of response among voters predicted by the theory in chapters 2 and 3. Campaign staff members describe campaigns in terms of controlling the agenda, tapping hot-button issues to mobilize various segments of the electorate, and defin ing the nature of the choice presented to voters. The language may dif fer somewhat, but the process they describe is an ef fort to induce heresthetic change. More generally , the comments of campaign staf f members suggest a broader understanding of the electoral process that conforms to the theory for which I argue. Campaign staff members realize that their candidates must have some credibility on the issues they stress during their campaigns. They know that candidates are not free to relocate in the issue space of an electorate and that candidates risk alienating current supporters if they attempt such moves. The GOP convention in Virginia certainly demonstrates the pull that party activists can have on a candidate. Campaign staff members, particularly those involved in developing the overall strategy for a campaign, are keenly aware of these constraints. They adopt a view of campaigns as ef forts to control the agenda and to define th choice presented to voters because they realize that this is about all that cam paigns can be expected to do. 1 Chapter 2 suggests that rational candidates seeking to win an election, faced with a series of constraints, would choose trying to induce heresthetic change over the course of the campaign as their most reasonable strategy. Campaign practitioners appear to operate with exactly this vision of electoral politics in mind. As much as the campaign is a learning process for voters, it is also a learning process for the candidates. Candidates seeking to focus the campaign on particular issues struggle to learn as much as they can about how voters might respond to specific appeals. From a theoretical perspective, one might a gue that this drive for information about the electorate...