The Consequences of Concurrent Campaigns for Citizen Knowledge of Congressional Candidates

Abstract

Congressional campaigns do not occur in isolation, but concurrently with many other races. What are the effects of overlapping campaigns for how people learn about congressional candidates? On one hand, intensely fought races on the same ballot may encourage people to extend interest to contemporaneous races. Alternatively, competing campaigns may distract voters and limit learning about down-ticket contests. Using American National Election Studies data from 1996 to 2002, I test the consequences of state level presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial campaign intensity on citizen learning about congressional candidates. I find that while the local intensity of the presidential race has little effect on knowledge of House candidates, the intensity of the Senate race is positively associated with candidate recognition. These effects vary depending on the nature of the election, where House candidates benefit from intense Senate races on the ballot particularly in midterm election years.

Coping with lengthy ballots

“…Rather she examines voters' knowledge of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, given possible concurrent elections for the president, the U.S. Senate, and governors' offices. Wolak (2009) finds mixed results for the effects of concurrent elections on knowledge about the candidates. Her results indicate the presence of a presidential race does not affect the ability of voters to recall the names of candidates for House of Representatives races.…”

“…Unlike much of the literature on concurrent elections, Wolak (2009) does not focus on the bottom of the ballot or low salience elections. Rather she examines voters' knowledge of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, given possible concurrent elections for the president, the U.S. Senate, and governors' offices.…”

Exploiting Friends-and-Neighbors to Estimate Coattail Effects

“…Estimating these effects might seem like a straightforward exercise, but this is not the case because a number of factors-including voters' preferences and the state of macroeconomy-affect how a party's 1 A high profile election can either provide or crowd out vote-relevant information in less salient concurrent elections (Freedman, Franz and Goldstein, 2004;Wolak, 2009). The mix of races on a ballot may affect the distribution of preferences of individuals who turn out to vote (Berry and Gersen, 2010), in part by changing parties and elites incentives to engage in mobilization (Cox, 1999).…”

Assessing the Impact of Alternative Voting Technologies on Multi-Party Elections: Design Features, Heuristic Processing and Voter Choice

“…Familiarity with candidates' names has also been shown to be a relevant determinant of electoral choice, to the extent that those who vote contrary to their partisan preferences usually do so in favor of the more renowned candidates (Wolak 2009). In this regard, the main difference between Prototype 2 and the ''purely'' party-centric devices-Prototypes 1 and 4-was that the former also underscored candidate-centric cues.…”