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"Sellers, Patrick J"
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Winning with Words
Today's politicians and political groups devote great attention and care to how their messages are conveyed. From policy debates in Congress to advertising on the campaign trail, they carefully choose which issues to emphasize and how to discuss them in the hope of affecting the opinions and evaluations of their target audience. This groundbreaking text brings together prominent scholars from political science, communication, and psychology in a tightly focused analysis of both the origins and the real-world impact of framing. Across the chapters, the authors discuss a broad range of contemporary issues, from taxes and health care to abortion, the death penalty, and the teaching of evolution. The chapters also illustrate the wide-ranging relevance of framing for many different contexts in American politics, including public opinion, the news media, election campaigns, parties, interest groups, Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary.
eBook
Cycles of Spin
How do politicians try to shape their news coverage? Sellers examines strategic communication campaigns in the U.S. Congress. He argues that these campaigns create cycles of spin: leaders create messages, rank-and-file legislators decide whether to promote those messages, journalists decide whether to cover the messages, and any coverage feeds back to influence the policy process. These four stages are closely related; decisions at one stage influence those at another. Sellers uses diverse evidence, from participant observation and press secretary interviews, to computerized content analysis and vector auto regression. The result is a comprehensive and unprecedented examination of politicians' promotional campaigns and journalists' coverage of those campaigns. Countering numerous critics of spin, Sellers offers the provocative argument that the promotional messages have their origins in the actual policy preferences of members of Congress. The campaigns to promote these messages thus can help the public learn about policy debates in Congress.
eBook
Fiscal Consistency and Federal District Spending in Congressional Elections
Conventional wisdom holds that legislators win votes by acquiring federal spending for constituents. Scholars have struggled, however, to support this belief empirically. This paper links federal district spending and pork with an explanation based on consistency: electoral performance hinges on legislators' fiscal consistency, i.e., whether their votes on federal spending are consistent with their credit claiming for pork flowing to their districts. In districts receiving substantial pork, fiscally liberal incumbents perform better electorally than fiscal conservatives. In low-pork districts fiscal conservatives perform better. These hypotheses are tested using aggregate-level data from the 1984-90 United States House elections and individual-level data from the 1988 Senate Election Study. The hypotheses are supported on the aggregate and individual levels. Fiscally consistent legislators receive more votes than fiscally inconsistent legislators.
Journal Article
Presidential Visits and Midterm Senate Elections
We investigate presidents' midterm domestic travel between 1982 and 2002. The president concentrates campaign appearances in states with competitive Senate races. These campaign visits appear to boost the candidates from the president's party. Yet, the president is not always working to further his party's collective goals. His individual electoral interests lead him to make official noncampaign visits to strengthen his own electroal support in some states. Self-interest also encourages the president to campaign for his party's candidates in states with numerous electroal votes, regardless of their chances of winning. Such campaign visits may help the president's own electoral fortunes but inefficiently further his party's collective interests.
Journal Article
Strategy and Background in Congressional Campaigns
Common conceptions of the electoral connection often make two assumptions about the behavior of candidates and voters. The first is that candidates focus their campaigns on their records. The second is that voters evaluate candidates on the basis of their campaign messages. This article explores how candidates' backgrounds influence these two components of representation. The main premise is simple: Campaign messages are more effective if they emphasize issues on which candidates have built a record that appears favorable to voters. Consequently, candidates tend to focus on this type of issue when choosing campaign themes. Candidates are less successful in winning favorable evaluations if they stray from their records and make unsubstantiated claims.
Journal Article
Tactical and Contextual Determinants of U.S. Senators' Approval Ratings
This paper focuses on U.S. senators and their home-state approval ratings from 1981 to 1997. We examine these ratings to assess the relative impacts of tactical factors, such as the senators' bill sponsorship and media activity, and contextual influences, such as economic performance, state population size, and the evaluations and behavior of other elected officials. We find that the senators' own tactical behavior affects the approval ratings, but a stronger influence is the context in which the senators operate.
Journal Article
The Supply Side of Congressional Redistricting: Race and Strategic Politicians, 1972–1992
The goal of empowering minorities through redistricting has been attacked from all sides. The Supreme Court recently called the North Carolina redistricting plan “political apartheid” (Shaw v. Reno 1993) while critics on the left reject the approach because it merely provides descriptive rather than substantive representation (Guinier 1991a, 1134–53). This article offers a new perspective from which to assess the viability of this approach to black empowerment: the supply side of redistricting. Using a unique data set from the 1972, 1982, and 1992 congressional elections in black districts, we examine how individual politicians respond to the changing electoral context imposed by new district lines and how, in turn, their decisions shape the electoral choices and outcomes in a given district. We argue that individual politicians acting in their own self-interest may tip the balance of electoral power to black and white moderates in the district. We find that this outcome prevails in approximately half of the new districts electing candidates who embody a “politics of commonality.” This finding runs counter to the fear of the Supreme Court and others that new minority districts promote “political apartheid.”
Journal Article
Mobilizing to Frame Election Campaigns
Following the example of many earlier candidates and campaigns, Barack Obama and his presidential campaign attempted to frame the 2008 election around issues favorable to the candidate. For Obama's team, that goal required linking John McCain to the unpopular incumbent president, focusing on an economic recession, and emphasizing a desire to bring the war in Iraq to a close. Obama's campaign deployed many typical methods for framing elections. Campaign spokespeople and high-profile surrogates logged countless hours speaking on radio and television shows and to crowds across the country. The campaign submitted its candidate to interviews with the press, sent out official statements when current events mandated a reaction, and crafted numerous advertisements for various media. These tactics attempted to frame the election campaign-both what issues would be discussed and how those issues would be debated-in a top-down, disciplined, and controlled manner.
Book Chapter
Introduction
On his fourth day in office, President Barack Obama delivered his first radio address to the nation. His remarks focused on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, legislation that Obama hoped Congress would pass quickly in order to stem the economic downturn. Despite the fact that the news media and many politicians commonly referred to the legislation as a \"stimulus package,\" Obama did not use the word stimulus once in his 806-word address. Democratic pollsters had indicated that the public was more willing to support an economic recovery package than an economic stimulus. Their research also indicated that the public was more supportive of the legislation when told about how the money would be spent than about the total amount of spending (Brown 2009). Not surprisingly, Obama's speech framed the legislation in a favorable way by focusing almost entirely on the programs that the spending would support, without ever mentioning the total size of the bill.
Book Chapter