What we were reading: Campaign Effects and Issue Voting

How much of a difference do campaigns make?

Conventional wisdom says that electoral campaigns remind voters who they are and what they want. So they do not change much, but still matter, because the outcome could be very different without all the reminders. This little gem here is a bit unusual, because it tracks a referendum campaign in Denmark, not a normal electoral race. Also, there is detailed information on the timing of information.

Beach, D., & Finke, D. (2020). The long shadow of attitudes: differential campaign effects and issue voting in eu referendums. West European Politics, (online first), . http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2020.1780829

What we liked

Students loved the fact, how the authors made use of panel data. They were also convinced by the rather intricate hypotheses that link to the literature on motivated reasoning. These complications not withstanding, they found the text quite accessible.

Politikens Hus, the central offices for Denmark’s biggest newspaper ‘Politiken’.
Photo by REVOLT on Unsplash

What we did not like so much

Ordered logit regression comes with problems of its own (hello parallel regressions assumption). We were not convinced that OLR is really necessary or even justified in this application. We also found some of the graphs a bit confusing. And like last week, students said that the summary (and even the presentation of the findings) were a bit too concise.

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