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Revisiting the Influence of Campaign Tone on Turnout in Senate Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Robert A. Jackson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2230. e-mail: rjackson@garnet.acns.fsu.edu (corresponding author)
Jason C. Sides
Affiliation:
Reubin O'D. Askew School of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306. e-mail: jcs6605@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

Abstract

Examining the influence of campaign tone on individual turnout in the 1990 U.S. Senate elections, this note revisits Kahn and Kenney's conclusion that the political profile of citizens (as based on partisanship, level of political interest, and level of political expertise) conditions their responsiveness. Implementing an appropriate modeling strategy for making group comparisons, our analyses do not provide statistical support for the conditional effects that they highlight. More generally, our results do reinforce Kahn and Kenney's finding that negativity in tone of news coverage mobilizes citizens, but they do not reveal significant turnout influence for television advertising tone.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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