This article examines the 1996 press releases issued by Republican presidential nominee candidates during the invisible primary and the subsequent stories generated by these press releases in newspapers. We systematically examine how campaigns structure their messages, which messages are transmitted by the press to the voting public, and what factors influence the transmission of the campaign's message. We find that campaign organizations disseminate a variety of messages to the media. Our analysis demonstrates that national media organizations are most receptive to informative (logistical) messages disseminated by candidates who are at the head of the field and most hostile to substantive (issue-oriented) messages regardless of their campaign of origin. By contrast, the state press is most open to substantive messages issued by lower-tier candidates. It appears from our results that the media, more than the campaign, bear the responsibility for the emphasis on the horse race.We focus our analysis on the role of both media norms and routines and the campaign process itself in shaping the campaign information environment. Determining which campaign messages are more likely to reach the public through the news media provides insight into the effect each of these institutions has on the election process; specifically we should arrive at a better understanding of how campaigns and news organizations interact to structure the campaign agenda. In the next section we discuss the theoretical underpinnings and research pertaining to the nature of campaign messages, media norms and routines, and the interplay between them. Theory and Evidence The Invisible PrimaryThe collapse of the primary season has made the invisible primary 2 an increasingly critical period for campaigns. It

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Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search‐and‐seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.

This article applies the theory of competitive (war) and substantive (marketing) communication strategies to the presidential nomination campaign, focusing primarily on the time period during which we expect the candidates to be most concerned with framing their campaigns-the invisible primary. We utilize candidate press releases to assess the accuracy of this theory and refine it. We then test the hypothesis that a candidate's strategic goals, which are generally defined by the candidate's competitive status relative to the field, determine the dominant type of message communicated during this penod. We find that there are definite patterns of messaging choice relative to candidate status. We also find that competitive messages dominate the "discourse" of candidates relative to the news media to a far greater extent than anticipated.The literatures surrounding the presidential selection process and candidate communication strategy posit two dominant messaging strategies for the conduct of presidential campaigns (Scammell 1998; Bowler and Farrell 1992;Collins and Butler 1996). Substantive strategies attempt to frame a candidate's campaign by defining policy positions and administration goals; competitive strategies attempt to define the campaign environment by ranking the contenders and handicapping the race. Unfortunately, systematic examination of campaign messaging strategies is lacking, leaving us unable to assess whether this typology accurately depicts the universe of campaign messaging strategies. Furthermore, even if we assume the substantive and competitive categories encapsulate all campaign messages, we lack any examination concerning when, how, and by whom these

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