Election Campaigns

Election Campaigns

If elections are the defining characteristic of democracies, then election campaigns are important to understand. But are they themselves important? That is, do they matter? In what ways?

Election campaigns can have many different effects. They can engage our interest in politics, causing us to pay more attention than we do in periods between elections. After all, the campaigns themselves are interesting, the stuff of much political activity and mass media coverage. In fact, many campaigns take it as an objective to pique our interest–or at least to attract our attention. The more we pay attention, of course, the more we may take stock of the government and its policies. We may reconsider our issue positions and possibly adopt new ones. We may even revisit our attachments to political actors, such as political parties or the broader political system itself.1 We may be more (or less) likely to vote. These all are important consequences, and there are others as well.

Above all else those of us who study elections want to know the extent to which campaigns influence who gets elected. The potential for influence of this sort partly reflects some of the things noted above, as issue positions, party attachment, and turnout obviously matter on election day. Campaigns can influence the outcome in other ways. What is the net effect of these different things? There actually are a number of possibilities. It may be that campaigns completely determine election outcomes. From this perspective, the election outcome is the sum of pretty much everything that happens during the course of the campaign. It alternatively may be that election day outcomes are shaped by forces beyond the control of candidates and parties and their campaigns, for instance, the economy or other conditions. Here, campaigns may not matter at all or else matter only to steer the vote toward its proper equilibrium, which even may be foreseeable in advance. Of course, it might be that campaigns matter in both ways–that they have effects on election day that are unpredictable and predictable.

This chapter assesses how election campaigns influence election outcomes, focusing especially on the national level.2 It begins with a consideration of [Page 99]what constitutes an election campaign–pretty clearly a campaign aims to win an election, but the characteristics differ across countries. It also considers how campaigns have changed over time. Then the chapter examines the extent to which and how campaigns matter on election day. We will see that campaigns do matter but that it varies somewhat across contexts. We also will see that the effects generally are more limited and subtle than one might expect given the attention they receive.