American Campaign Techniques Worldwide

Plasser, Fritz

doi:10.1080/17533170200603106

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…We could therefore argue that there are minimal actual differences between the majority of parties surveyed, but there are outliers which skew findings. Such a conclusion may indicate equalization in terms of professionalization (Plasser, 2000), with parties campaigning using fairly similar strategies just reporting slightly different priorities. Here, we argue that other less tangible variables are at play such as party traditions of campaigning and perceptions of what works within their context.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning

Tenscher

Koc-Michalska

Lilleker

et al. 2015

European Journal of Communication

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International audienceFaced with some fundamental changes in the socio-cultural, political and media environment, political parties in post-industrialized democracies have started to initiate substantial transformations of both their organizational structures and communicative practices. Those innovations, described as professionalization, become most obvious during election campaigns. In recent times, the number of empirical studies measuring the degree of political parties’ campaign professionalism has grown. They have relied on a broad spectrum of indicators derived from theory which have not been tested for their validity. For the first time, we put these indicators to a ‘reality check’ by asking top-ranked party secretaries and campaign managers in 12 European countries to offer their perceptions of professional election campaigning. Furthermore, we investigate whether any differences in understanding professionalism among party campaign practitioners can be explained by macro (country) and meso (party) factors. By and large, our results confirm the validity of most indicators applied in empirical studies on campaign professionalism so far. There are some party- and country-related differences in assessing campaign professionalism too, but the influence of most factors on practitioners’ evaluations is weak. Therefore, we conclude that largely there is a far-reaching European Union-wide common understanding of professional election campaigning

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Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning

Tenscher

Koc-Michalska

Lilleker

et al. 2015

European Journal of Communication

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“…However, party competition and the centralization of communication in Canadian federal politics have made it difficult to secure interviews with party insiders who are not averse to discussing "secrets." Identification of Canadian political consultants is also challenging; lists of political consultants that are used in other countries (Medvic, 2003;Plasser, 2000) are incomplete in Canada. To develop a respondent pool, a list was prepared of high ranking party strategists and media pollsters mentioned in published accounts of the 2006 and 2008 Canadian general elections, and this was supplemented by a snowballing technique of pursuing referrals from respondents (also used by Magleby & Patterson, 1998;Plasser, 2000).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Perhaps not surprisingly, in international research of political consulting and political marketing such as by Plasser (2000), there has been little expression of interest in the Canadian case. Yet in recent years the services of Canadian party and media consultants have been supplemented by a variety of boutique consultants as part of an outsourcing trend that is sustained by competition, declining volunteerism, interparty collaboration, and stable party financing (Cross, 2004;Esselment, 2011;Flanagan, 2009).…”

Section: Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Canadian Political Consultants’ Perspectives about Political Marketing

Lees‐Marshment

Marland

2012

Canadian Journal of Communication

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“…Despite this spending, campaigns often fail to mobilize voters for the campaign's cause. Take the United States for example, where the "professionalization" (Muller 1999) of campaigning has had its origin 1 (Plasser 2000). Arguably, nowhere else is political campaigning a bigger business then in the United States.…”

Section: Campaigning Mobilization and Turnout In The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influencing Elections with Statistics: Targeting Voters with Logistic Regression Trees

Rusch

Lee²,

Hornik

et al. 2012

SSRN Journal

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Political campaigning has become a multi-million dollar business. A substantial proportion of a campaign's budget is spent on voter mobilization, i.e., on identifying and influencing as many people as possible to vote. Based on data, campaigns use statistical tools to provide a basis for deciding who to target. While the data available is usually rich, campaigns have traditionally relied on a rather limited selection of information, often including only previous voting behavior and one or two demographical variables. Statistical procedures that are currently in use include logistic regression or standard classification tree methods like CHAID, but there is a growing interest in employing modern data mining approaches. Along the lines of this development, we propose a modern framework for voter targeting called LORET (for logistic regression trees) that employs trees (with possibly just a single root node) containing logistic regressions (with possibly just an intercept) in every leaf. Thus, they contain logistic regression and classification trees as special cases and allow for a synthesis of both techniques under one umbrella. We explore various flavors of LORET models that (a) compare the effect of using the full set of available variables against using only limited information and (b) investigate their varying effects either as regressors in the logistic model components or as partitioning variables in the tree components. To assess model performance and illustrate targeting, we apply LORET to a data set of 19,634 eligible voters from the 2004 US presidential election. We find that augmenting the standard set of variables (such as age and voting history) together with additional predictor variables (such as the household composition in terms of party affiliation and each individual's rank in the household) clearly improves predictive accuracy. We also find that LORET models based on tree induction outbeat the unpartitioned competitors. Additionally, LORET models using both partitioning variables and regressors in the resulting nodes can improve the efficiency of allocating campaign resources while still providing intelligible models.

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American Campaign Techniques Worldwide

Cited by 13 publications

References 19 publications

The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning

The professionals speak: Practitioners’ perspectives on professional election campaigning

Canadian Political Consultants’ Perspectives about Political Marketing

Influencing Elections with Statistics: Targeting Voters with Logistic Regression Trees

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