Summary of Atkeson and Partin: Candidate Advertisemens, media coverage, and citizen attitudes -- Adam Brown, BYU Political Science

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Atkeson and Partin: Candidate Advertisemens, media coverage, and citizen attitudes

Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.

Atkeson and Partin. 2001. Candidate advertisements, media coverage, and citizen attitudes: Agendas and roles of Senators and governors. Political Research Quarterly.

Overview

Federalism serves as a cue (or, as the authors say, a "frame") by which we understand which policy issues a candidate should discuss. National candidates (Senators) can discuss redistribution (Social Security, Medicaid) and national security; state candidates (governors) can discuss development (economy, education, transportation, crime/drugs, environment). This federal frame determines (1) what candidates say, (2) what the media say, and (3) what voters think.

Hypotheses and Methods

H1: Campaign ads

Hyp: Senators will run advertisements discussing national concerns and redistribution, governors will run advertisements discussing development.
Test: Sample 1986 Senate and gubernatorial races. Collect all TV ads from sampled races. Code whether they discuss an issue.

H2: News coverage

Hyp: Newspapers will discuss national concerns and redistribution when covering Senate campaigns; they will cover developmental concerns when covering gubernatorial campaigns.
Test: Sample four states that had both a Senate and gubernatorial race in 1986. Cover news coverage in the largest paper for each state and see which issues are mentioned in articles about particular candidates.

H3: Voter perceptions

Hyp: Voters will assign responsibility for national concerns to Senators; they will assign responsibility for development concerns to governors.
Test: A survey in New Mexico. Ask respondents to assign responsibility for each issue to either the governor ("1" on a seven-point scale), the Senator ("7" on the scale), or shared ("4") on the scale.

Findings

See Table 2. It's a logit to predict whether the candidate was for Senate (Y=0) or governor (Y=1). Most coefficients are highly significant.
See Table 4. Shows that voters do assign responsibility for issues either to governor or Senator.

Research by the same authors

Research on similar subjects

Arceneaux: The federal face of voting (6 shared tags)
Popkin: The reasoning voter (6 shared tags)
Ansolabehere and Iyengar: Riding the wave and claiming ownership over issues (5 shared tags)
Mutz: Effects of "in-your-face" television discourse on perceptions of a legitimate opposition (5 shared tags)
Aldrich, Sullivan, and Borgida: Foreign affairs and issue voting (4 shared tags)
Basinger and Lavine: Ambivalence, information, and electoral chioce (4 shared tags)
Carsey and Wright: State and national factors in gubernatorial and senatorial elections (4 shared tags)
Miller, Krosnick, and Fabrigar: The origins of policy issue salience (4 shared tags)

Tags

Atkeson, Lonna Rae (author) • Partin, Randall (author) • American Politics • Public Opinion • Media Effects • Voting • Federalism • Information • Shortcuts

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