Election Campaign



Election Campaign

Introduction

Political campaigns represent the core of representative democracy. To win an election, a candidate must earn the support of the general public. The quality of a democratic society can be easily linked to the quality of its election campaigns. Vigorously contested elections and widespread voter participation are two of the hallmarks of a strong democratic nation. Scholarship into campaigns therefore has significant implications for the quality of democracy.

As parties weakened from the beginning of the 20th century, candidates (and therefore campaigns) became much more important. Candidates have taken on the responsibility of organizing and funding their contests after more than a century of partisan control over campaign administration. In the intervening century, campaigns have become more varied in their approaches, structures, and strategies. The continuing evolution of campaigns and campaigning has created a rich area for academics to study (Burton, 2003).

However, campaigns have been the subject of serious scholarly attention for only the last 20 years. The bulk of academic work in election campaigns has focused on the resulting voting and citizen participation in those campaigns. The campaigns themselves—the organized efforts to motivate voters to support a particular candidate—had been largely ignored until the 1980s. Over the last 20-plus years, though, campaign scholarship has developed significantly.

One of the great difficulties in studying campaigns is the diversity of styles that exist at different levels of election. For instance, a contest for the U.S. Senate will be almost unrecognizable from the nationwide spread and focus of a presidential contest. A city commission election, which is tiny in comparison to either the senatorial or presidential level, will barely be noticeable in campaign activity compared with either of the other contests. Just because there is a contest for political office does not mean that all campaigns are the same. Some campaign elements, such as strategy, will be universal. But in almost every way, campaigns are beholden to the level of office sought. The diversity of levels and styles means that general theory building is much more difficult in the area of campaigns.

Level of Campaign

The presidential election is unique in American politics, the producer of constant campaign material for 18 months and longer. Sidney Blumenthal first termed the presidential contest the permanent campaign in 1982. Ornstein and Mann (2000) critique the constant campaigning, pointing out that once elected, political figures cannot disconnect from campaign mode and that policy is made more for the purposes of re-election than solving collective problems (Ornstein, 2000).

Presidential primaries are a unique entity in and of themselves and subject to their own scholarship. The primaries are held early in an election year, but in fact the process of campaigning begins more than 20 years earlier. In presidential primaries, one significant question relates to representativeness of voters. If a presidential primary features low and unrepresentative turnout, then the implications for a democratic society are dire. Unrepresentative party nominees who are less appealing to the general election electorate can mean lower voter turnout and dissatisfaction with ...