A Monkey Cage reader asks:

I’m just curious, is there much information out there about what (if anything) precisely impacts voting on referendums or initiatives? And if so, what aspects of a referendum campaign are most effective (like advertising, phone banking, door to door campaigning, etc.). Any information and/or help locating any information would be much appreciated.

There is some work on whether the presence of initiatives on the ballot serves as a mobilizing factor.  See, e.g., here or here.  I’m not sure about work that specifically addresses what means of mobilization motivate people to vote in such campaigns.  I assume that studies of mobilization in elections generally would have some applicability, however.

On how voters make choices in initiatives, I think a dominant notion is that voters rely on shortcuts or heuristics.  See, for example, Arthur Lupia’s piece on the role of group endorsements—as well as other of his work.  Or Regina Branton’s piece, which highlights the role of party identification.  There are also other relevant pieces listed under hers.

I welcome other suggestions.

Norm Ornstein and others have long been concerned about the US government’s poor record at planning for the continuity of government in case of disaster, terrorist or otherwise.

So, we probably shouldn’t poke too much fun at Wyoming’s recent efforts to think ahead in the event of the apocalypse. (After all, both the Mayans and the GOP candidates in their Arizona debate have warned that it is nigh.)

Still, it is intriguing to read that in case the United States disintegrate, Wyoming hopes to acquire an aircraft carrier. And, presumably aircraft. And, presumably, a coastline…

This is a guest post by political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus.

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The Romney campaign recently came under scrutiny for first suggesting that, because of his history in the state and as a frontrunner for the nomination, Michigan was a “must win”—but then backtracking.  The campaign claimed they were not altering their strategy based on a challenge from Rick Santorum but that they were simply trying to get to 1,145 delegates.

They might be right.  The Romney campaign seems to be following the logical strategy for frontrunners.

In a 2009 article, Travis Ridout, Nathan Hosey, and I investigated how candidates allocated advertising dollars and visits to different states during the 2004 and 2008 presidential nominating campaigns.  We looked at such factors as delegate selection method, cash on hand, the competitiveness of the primary, and frontrunner status.

We found that frontrunners were more likely to visit states with winner-take-all delegate allocations or caucuses than were underdogs.  Frontrunners were less likely than underdogs to advertise in states with caucuses or proportional delegate allocation methods.  The implication may be that, even without the challenge from Santorum, as a frontrunner Romney would be spending considerable time and money in Michigan anyway.

And what about Santorum, now one of the (seemingly endless) rotating list of Republican nomination “frontrunners”?  Is his strategy consistent with his newfound frontrunner status?

The figure below tracks the total number of recent candidate visits to Michigan, Arizona and Washington, excluding visits for participation in debates.  Visits to these states conform to what our findings.  The frontrunners, Romney and Santorum, visited the primary states of Michigan and Arizona more frequently than did underdogs Gingrich and Paul.  Likewise, Gingrich and Paul visited Washington State, which holds proportionally allocated (non-binding) caucuses on March 3, more frequently than did Romney and Santorum.

Santorum’s recent travel thus suggests that he’s acting more like a frontrunner.  He appears to be abandoning the “long shot” strategy of focusing on proportional caucus states (even non-binding ones) that he used to win the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses just weeks ago.

This is a guest post by former guest-blogger and University of Chicago political scientist Paul Staniland:

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Anne-Marie Slaughter has a provocative op-ed in today’s New York Times calling for intervention in Syria. She argues that simply arming the opposition will trigger a proxy war. Instead, she advocates creating “no-kill zones” that are explicitly defensive, rather than offensive, in intent: “The key condition for all such assistance, inside or outside Syria, is that it be used defensively.” The problem is that many of her policy suggestions will have the same effects as offensive war. This is regime change by any other name.

Slaughter’s policy recommendations have several components.

First, she advocates arming the opposition to create no-kill zones and humanitarian corridors: local states need to “arm the opposition soldiers with anti-tank, countersniper and portable antiaircraft weapons.” It’s not clear how this is different than the ostensible alternative of arming the opposition; they seem to be precisely the same thing. Moreover, special forces from Qatar, Turkey, and possibly Britain and France would advise and support the Free Syrian Army. This is more aggressive than just arming the opposition.

The second step in the plan is that “Once Syrian government forces were killed, captured or allowed to defect without reprisal, attention would turn to defending and expanding the no-kill zones.” This is obviously a form of offensive military action: “expanding the no-kill zones” means taking and consolidating territorial control through the use of anti-tank, countersniper, and portable antiaircraft weapons. Indeed, the explicit goal is to cause a rupture in the Syrian security forces, which cannot occur unless there is conflict. As she notes, the strategy aims to “weaken and isolate government units charged with attacking particular towns.” Actively weakening and isolating standing conventional forces looks like offensive war, not defensive humanitarian intervention.

Third, Slaughter advocates using Turkish and Arab League “remotely piloted helicopters, either for delivery of cargo and weapons — as America has used them in Afghanistan — or to attack Syrian air defenses and mortars in order to protect the no-kill zones.” Given that most drones have little cargo capacity, in reality this means targeting Syrian air defenses and local conventional forces. Making this strategy unambiguously “defensive” is difficult, since it clearly aims to degrade capabilities central to Syrian regime survival. The difference between offense and defense is often in the eye of the beholder.

Slaughter promises that any offensive actions by the Free Syrian Army would be punished – but who would punish them? The internal logic of her own argument encourages the expansion of FSA control. For the strategy to work, the FSA needs to go on the offensive in order to force crises within the Syrian forces, create more no-kill zones, and liberate targeted cities in order to create some kind of “truce.”

Furthermore, carefully managing and manipulating local armed forces from the outside is extremely difficult. This is why Slaughter’s disclaimer that “revenge attacks would not be tolerated” is difficult to believe: once international powers have thrown their support behind the FSA, its (fractious) forces will have enormous power to create facts on the ground. Figuring out who is responsible for what military actions will be difficult in the fog of war. Indeed, there are reports that the insurgents are already “bringing in defensive and offensive weapons.” Understandably, they have their own agendas that aren’t simple reflection of international desires. The experience of Libya in recent months provides little evidence that the international community is able to tightly control loosely-organized local armed groups.

The Syrian government’s repression is absolutely abhorrent (as this video shows), and advocating the fall of Assad is Slaughter’s prerogative. But let’s not pretend that her preferred strategy is something other than regime change through proxy war. This is a potentially very costly policy (as Marc Lynch points out), and its advocates ought to be forthright about the risks of escalation. Real debate isn’t advanced by delicate euphemisms.

This paper seeks to understand the effect of campaign finance laws on electoral and policy outcomes. Spurred by the recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which eliminated bans on corporate and union political spending, the study focuses on whether such bans generate consequences notably different from an electoral system that lacks such bans. We observe three key outcomes: partisan control of government, incumbent reelection rates and corporate tax burdens. Using historical data on regulations in 49 American states between 1935 and 2009 we test alternative models for evaluating the impact of corporate and union spending bans put in place during this period. The results indicate that spending bans appear to have limited, if any, effect on these outcomes.

From a new paper by Ray Laraja and Brian Schaffner.  Their findings are very much in the spirit of the research I noted not long after the Citizens United decision (here, here, and here).

We are able to uncover considerable evidence of a religious left among Christians, and the big news is that it matters electorally.  Having a strong communitarian view of faith is associated with voting for Democratic candidates.

That is political scientist Ken Wald in this interview.  For more, see Jordan Ragusa’s post at Rule22.

There were some good comments on my earlier negative ads zombie post, and Phil Arena has also posted a reply.  Let me make a few more observations.

At least one commenter wonders how I can claim that there is any zombie at work here.  After all, I note that the literature on negative advertising certainly doesn’t conclude that it never ever ever works.  So why shouldn’t people go on believing that it works?  The problem—the zombie—is that the belief that it works, as expressed in many different news articles and commentaries, pays little attention to context or nuance—that is, to why negative advertising might matter more in some races than others.  I have no problem with context or nuance.  Categorical statements are the zombie here.

Another commenter brings up the current GOP primary.  Didn’t the ads matter there?  What about Florida?  I’m actually on record believing that the ads in Florida might have mattered.  It’s consistent with what I wrote earlier: in general advertising will matter more when (a) one candidate can vastly out-spend opponents (as Romney did), and (b) when opinions about the candidates aren’t crystallized (as is true in the GOP primary).  If we could get reporting about negative ads to start thinking about (a) and (b) and other such factors, the zombie would be dead.

But here’s another thing: say (a) and (b) hold.  Then the question becomes: would negative ads be categorically more effective than positive ads?  Do we conclusive evidence of that?  Not by any stretch.  So just because advertising might be more effective in certain circumstances doesn’t mean that negative ads will also be more powerful than positive ads in those circumstances.  There is a lot of folk wisdom about whether and why and how to use negativity, little of which has been subjected to any kind of rigorous test.

Arena wonders about limits in the evidence about negative advertising.  He seems to think these limits may be so great that no journalist who believes in the power of negative ads needs to revise his or her opinion in light of political science research.   If I understand him correctly, the limit that arises is this: candidates who are leading have little incentive to “go negative” and candidates who are behind do have this incentive.  So if negative advertising is being driven by how well candidates are doing in the race, how can we show that it actually affects how well they do in the race?  What’s the cause and what’s the effect?  How can we disentangle them?

Of course, there are also many experimental studies of negative ads that less vulnerable to this cause-and-effect problem. They don’t conclusively support the conventional wisdom that negative advertising “works,” although one can always ask whether their findings would generalize to the “real world.”

Perhaps more relevant to Arena’s point is this paper by Matt Blackwell, which I linked to in the zombie post.  Blackwell writes:

Candidates in these races change their tone over the course of the campaign, reacting to their current environment. A single-shot causal inference method compares campaigns that are similar on a host of pre-election variables in order to eliminate omitted variable bias. While this is often the best approach with single-shot data, such an approach ignores the fundamentally dynamic nature of campaigns: races that become close over the course of the campaign are more likely to go negative than those that are safe. Attempting to correct for this dynamic selection by controlling for polls leads to post-treatment bias since earlier campaign tone influences polling. The inappropriate application of single-shot causal inference therefore leaves scholars between a rock and hard place, steeped in bias with either approach.

Blackwell centers on the problem underlying interpretations of causes and effects: “races that become close over the course of the campaign are more likely to go negative than those that are safe.”

Blackwell uses some sophisticated modeling to try to deal with this problem, analyzing 176 gubernatorial and senatorial elections from 2000 through 2006.  I’ll skip the statistics and get to the main finding, because it precisely illustrates what I was saying in my zombie post:

Once I correct for the biases due to time, I find that negative advertising is an effective strategy for Democratic non-incumbents. This stands in contrast to the previous literature on negative advertising, which, according to Lau, Sigelman, and Rovner (2007), “does not bear out the idea that negative advertising is an effective means of winning votes.”

Now, as written, it would appear that this directly contradicts my argument in the zombie post, since I used the Lau, Sigelman, and Rovner meta-analysis to make my point.  But if you look at his findings, you’ll actually see an illustration of my point about context and nuance.  He finds that negative ads work for Democratic non-incumbents but only when aired close to Election Day.  Among Democratic incumbents, negative ads also work only when aired close to Election Day—but they work in the opposite way intended, driving down vote share for those incumbents.

In other words, we have a finding that confirms the conventional wisdom but is limited to one set of candidates and to ads aired at a particular time.  And then we have a finding for a different set of candidates that utterly contradicts the conventional wisdom.  And this is in the article that probably does the best job to date of dealing with the problems that Arena raises.

Of course, it’s just one article.  So we shouldn’t hang everything on it.  Still I think that the academic literature on negative advertising isn’t so hamstrung by methodological problems that journalists and others can safely ignore it and go on believing that negative ads “work,” full stop.  Context and nuance are necessary, and they will suffice to kill the zombie.

For more, see Michael Tesler’s post at Model Politics.

• The most important election ever.  A nice piece by David Mayhew, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

• The GOP debates, common knowledge, and coordination problems.

• A chart on campaign spending, and Jon Bernstein’s reaction.

• 70 years of elections research—as a poem.

• The psychological effects of wealth (via Daniel Lippman).  Could connect to the research on how politicians of different social classes vote.

• Couples changing outfits.  Via @annielowrey.

• Early Dylan.

Continuing the series, here’s another zombie idea: negative advertising “works.”  Either by hurting the candidate who is attacked or by turning off voters from the campaign altogether.  The sheer volume of negative ads certainly keeps this zombie living.

As does the terrific string of cliches attached to so much writing about negative ads.  Consider this piece.  We have effluvia: “tsunami of slime,” “toxic.”  Boxing: “win the fight with a knockout punch.”  Gore: “expensive and brutal evisceration,” “bloody victory.” And, of course, war, war, war: “ammo,” “counter-offensive,” “sharpening their arrows,” etc.  (I am not even one-fifth of the way through the piece.)

As does many examples of campaign reporting that discuss tactics—like negative ads or the micro-targeting of ads—with only vague statements about their effects.  Often from people whose very profession involves convincing candidates to pay them to make ads!

And so you get this from a forthcoming New America Foundation event:

Mudslinging isn’t pretty. But research — and conventional wisdom — says negative political ad campaigns work. Indeed, the tone early on in the 2012 contest suggests that accentuating the positive will not be the hallmark of this election cycle. Should that be of concern to us all? Are negative ads corrosive to our political discourse, or are they, in fact, a vital means of informing the electorate? Join us to consider how political messaging has evolved to its current state, as well as its impact on our broader culture. (And yes, we’ll be airing many past and current commercials.)

No, that’s not what “research” says.  I wrote two pieces on what the research about candidate advertising says—here and here—and I’ll quote from their discussion of negative advertising.

It is virtually a truism that negative advertisements make the candidate being attacked look bad, and the candidate doing the attacking look good. In 2008, Mark Penn hewed close to this conventional wisdom, asserting that despite research showing that voters dislike negativity, “clever” negative ads work. He wrote, “When reality and research differ, it is the research that is wrong.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t really know the reality. The most comprehensive meta-analysis of research into negative advertising found no conclusive evidence that they work:

“All told, the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign.”

Take the “Daisy ad.” Perhaps the most infamous negative presidential ad of all time didn’t appear to move either Lyndon B. Johnson’s or Barry Goldwater’s poll numbers. And don’t be fooled by accounts suggesting that a negative ad had some subtle effect on a race — “changed the narrative” or another similarly squishy phrase. Votes, not narratives, are what wins elections.

Die, zombie, die!