Elections And State Wide Races Essay, Research Paper
author=”Alvarez, R. Michael”
title=”The Dynamics of Issue Emphasis: Campaign Strategy and Media
Coverage in Statewide Races”
keywords=”Campaigns, Elections, California Politics, 1994 Elections,
Senate Campaigns, Gubernatorial Campaigns”
Electoral campaigns provide for recurrent points of contact between
constitutents and representatives and thereby play an important role
in democratic theory and practice. However, most of the research on
electoral campaigns in America has reached pessimistic conclusions
about the possibility for these campaigns to inform the electorate,
and to lead to informed voting. This paper represents a component
of a larger agenda to re-examine the role that electoral campaigns
play in American democracy. Here I argue that while
presidential election campaigns are more informative than this
literature has lead us to believe, the place to look
for campaign effects is in state-wide elections. Secondly, I argue
that existing research has not taken the dynamic elements of campaigns
into consideration, and neither has it looked closely at the effects
of political institutions on campaign dynamics and strategies. In the
remainder of the paper I present some preliminary evidence from a new
data collection from the 1994 Senate and gubernatorial elections in
California. The data used here are from a content analysis of newspaper
articles from a set of state and local newspapers in California from two
weeks before the primary (June 7, 1994) until the general election
(November 8). I find: the candidates for the governor’s seat did not
generally obtain a disproportionate share of the newspaper coverage;
the incumbents in both races did not enjoy more coverage than did their
challengers; substantive coverage of the candidates was substantial, and was
not swamped by coverage of the horserace and of campaign events; issue
coverage does seem tied to the political institution, but this connection
seems partly predicated on the messages sent by the candidates; and last,
coverage across the newspapers appears to be similar over time.