The question: How do candidates decide what to emphasize in their campaign communications? When do they go negative? When do they stick to the issues? When do they emphasize their experience and community ties? And given how many thousands of campaigns are run around this country each election cycle, how can we possible study all this?

There has been some previous work on this question, but most of it has looked at television ads or media coverage. Both sources have flaws. Television ads and media coverage are more common in the most competitive races, since safe incumbents don’t spend money on ads. They are also more common in Senate races than House races. How, then, can we use television ads to see how rhetoric is different in competitive races or in House races than in other races?

In a recent article, Druckman et al. avoid these problems by looking instead at rhetoric in Congressional campaign websites in 2002, 2004, and 2006. Although not all candidates had websites in 2002, by 2004 and 2006 just about every major-party Congressional candidate had a website. And what do we learn?

Findings

• Challengers are far more likely than incumbents to use negative attacks (whether personal attacks or issue contrasts) than incumbents.
• Challengers are more likely than incumbents to use “Web 2.0″ technologies that enable visitors to create content (e.g. via commenting on the site).
• Challengers are more likely than incumbents to stress their party affiliation and to bring up issues that their party “owns,” particularly if the incumbent is not a member of the district’s majority party.²
• Incumbents are more likely than challengers to emphasize their experience, their long history in the district, and the specific benefits (pork) they have provided to the district. This is especially true in hotly contested districts; elsewhere, incumbents are unlikely to put much effort at all into their websites.

Theory

Druckman and his colleagues tell a compelling story to explain these findings. Briefly, and with considerable re-interpretation by me:

• Going negative and enabling interactive Web 2.0 technologies are risky. Since incumbents enjoy significant electoral advantages³, they feel no need to take on these risks. But challengers seeking to overcome these advantages may find these risks worth taking. Thus, challengers are more likely to pepper their sites with negative comments and also to provide forums, wikis, or commenting interfaces.
• Partisanship is often as valuable a cue to voters as incumbency. Thus, challengers make a partisan case against incumbents who belong to the district’s minority party.
• Incumbents want to do what they can to strengthen their incumbency advantage. Thus, an emphasis on talking about things that only incumbents have (experience, credit claiming opportunities, etc).

Importance

The authors’ biggest contribution is their thorough, thoughtful, and insightful use of campaign websites. This data source allows for a near-universal (especially after 2002), unfiltered look at what candidates want voters to hear. And this method does, indeed, yield different results than we would find if the authors had relied on more traditional data sources, such as TV ads or media coverage. When the authors restrict their analysis to those races that had significant ad buys or media coverage, many of their important results disappear into statistical oblivion. The authors have identified a cheap, easy way to capture a fuller sample of current campaign messages.

Quibbles and parting jabs

I like this article, but the authors need to be careful not to oversell their contribution.⁴ Reliance on websites as a true measure of what messages campaigns are actually pushing may not be as much a panacea as claimed.

First: Who reads campaign websites? The authors use a survey of campaign web developers to show who, in the developers’ minds, reads the websites. Even the developers concede that the main target audience–swing voters–is the least likely of all to actually visit the site. But remember that the web developers probably dramatically overestimate the importance of their product. How else would they sell their services? Consider the websites of two prominent members of Congress: Eric Cantor (Republican Whip) and Jim Clyburn (Democratic Whip).⁵ Alexa.com is a free service that tracks how many people view websites.⁶ Alexa reports that so few people visit Cantor’s (report) and Clyburn’s (report) sites that it can’t even provide an estimate of their reach.⁷ So, I ask: Do we have evidence that anybody actually reads these websites?

Druckman et al. would probably counter that it doesn’t matter whether anybody visits the site. What matters is that the site summarizes the campaign messages being used by the candidate generally, both online, in ads, and in appearances. Well…

Second: Do candidates actually push the same messages in the real world as in their websites? You can fit many, many campaign messages into a website. You can only fit a small handful into a single ad, appearance, or mailer. Perhaps candidates intentionally place their most provocative messages on their websites to avoid having to say them to their opponent’s face during a debate. We saw this in the 2008 presidential race. Both presidential campaigns released their worst ads online only, knowing that the media would see them and relay the attack’s message to conflict-hungry viewers. This was a hands-off way for candidates to get negative messages out into the blogosphere without having to push the messages personally. If that happens in Congressional races too, then this study is flawed–perhaps deeply.

But again. I like the article. It makes a fabulous contribution. The authors do as most of us do, however, by overselling their point.

Political scientists have fretted over that possibility for decades. The first major findings found that mass media had “minimal effects” on public opinion.¹ More recently, scholars have found that political communications can influence opinion in a few ways. Of particular importance for this study, some scholars have reported that politicians and mass media can influence public opinion by choosing how to frame a story. Is protecting rainforests about indigenous rights or environmental concerns?² Are urban growth limits about protecting greenbelts or attracting greenbacks?³

Chong and Druckman’s argument, in essence, is that previous studies have used methodologies that exaggerate the real-world importance of framing. Overwhelmingly, previous experiments have tested the effect of exposing people to a single frame (on one side of the issue) or none at all (the control group). These studies have found strong framing effects.

By contrast, Chong and Druckman develop two frames–one strong, one weak–on each side of their chosen issues, for a total of four frames.⁴ They randomly assign participants to receive some combination of these frames (or, in the control group, none of them). Some receive two frames on one side of the issue; some receive a strong frame on one side, a weak frame on the other side; some receive only a single frame; and some receive both frames on one side and one on the other.

This setup mirrors real political life more closely than the single-frame studies published previously, since real politics involve multiple actors seeking to promote their view. The most interesting and important conclusions:

• Strong frames move opinion significantly. Weak frames generally did not, with some exceptions.
• A weak frame one one side opposed by a strong frame on the other produced a contrast effect; that is, respondents moved even closer to the strong frame’s view than if they had been exposed to only the strong frame. This effect was most pronounced among politically informed participants.
• Competition between strong opposing frames has a moderating effect. Rather than reject the frame that discords with the respondent’s prior views, embracing only the concordant frame, the two frames interacted to pull respondents toward an intermediate position.

The latter conclusion interested me most. With most contentious issues, there are at least two strong frames competing for recognition. In fact, the presence of two strong frames may be what makes an issue contentious in the first place. Studies that explore the effects of only a single frame, rather than examining competing frames, will therefore overstate the importance of frames.

This conclusion about moderation runs contrary to other recent research about polarization. In a literature summarized in Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough⁵, other researchers have found that experiment participants will tend to accept uncritically arguments in favor of their prior view, while searching carefully for flaws in opposing arguments. It is unclear why Chong and Druckman found opposite results.

Do we truly believe that ALL red-state residents are ignorant racist fascist knuckle-dragging NASCAR-obsessed cousin-marrying road-kill-eating tobacco-juice-dribbling gun-fondling religious fanatic rednecks; or that ALL blue-state residents are godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing Communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts?¹

With that opening quotation from Dave Barry, Mutz introduces her central question: How do Americans form their opinions about their political opponents? Why can some Americans agree to disagree with their “worthy opposition” while others dismiss their political opponents as irrational lunatics?² Numerous previous studies have asked how Americans form their personal political preferences, but Mutz asks a new question. To answer it, Mutz looks carefully at the effects of political television.

In carefully crafted experiments, Mutz examines the effects of two features of political television: Its use of extreme closeups on a speaker’s face rather than on more comfortable upper-body shots, and its tendency to broadcast uncivil shouting matches instead of civil debates. Her experiments feature two actors posing as Congressional candidates, with their debate filmed twice: Both use the same script, but the uncivil one adds rude body language (eyerolling) and sarcastic asides (“You have completely missed the point here!”). Both are filmed simultaneously from both close-up and medium camera perspectives, resulting in a 2×2 treatment matrix.

As it turns out, these two variables interact to influence our attitudes about whichever “candidate” we disagree with. Mutz arrives at three primary conclusions:

1. Incivility and extreme closeups increase viewer arousal (i.e. attention and excitement).
2. In turn, increased arousal improves viewers’ recollection of the two actors’ policy arguments.
3. However, viewers had a much more negative opinion of the opposition actor if they saw the uncivil, close-in version of the debate. By contrast, seeing the civil, close-in version actually increased perceptions of opposition legitimacy relative to the control.

Thus, it appears that television could be used to increase Americans’ perceptions of their opponents, even if it doesn’t change their policy positions. For this to happen, television producers would need to show intimate (close-up) video of civil discussions. More frequently, however, we see close-up video of uncivil disputes, which has exactly the opposite effect; this effect may explain some of the recent increase in American political polarization.

These conclusions are subject to some interactions and qualifiers. Read on.

Place in the Literature

Mutz relies on previous psychological and sociological studies about personal space and arousal. However, her study could also fit into several other literatures that she alludes to with greater or lesser specificity. Most obviously, Mutz’s work fits into the literature on negative campaign advertising, although she does little to make this connection. Some studies (notably those from Ansolabehere and Iyengar) have argued that negative advertising engenders distrust and disgust among the electorate. By contrast, others have argued that negative advertising is a good thing, given that voters can glean valuable information from it (see Freedman et al. 2004). Mutz’s second and third conclusions (above) may help rectify these two positions.

Theoretical Argument

Most citizens have little reason to spend time learning about political candidates, an insight dating back to Downs (1957). However, they can rely on people or groups that they trust as “shortcuts” to acquiring the information they need (see Berelson et al. 1954, Lupia and McCubbins 1998, Page et al. 1987, and Popkin 1994).

In modern politics, televised political discourse serves as one such information shortcut. Voters can watch others engage in political debates rather than engage in them themselves. However, televised political discourse departs in two major ways from normal human discourse. First, camera angles tend to be extremely close-up–much closer than we could comfortably stand to somebody. Second, pundits are far less civil than we normally are to one another.

Previous research has told us a few things about in-your-face and uncivil interaction. First, incivility increases arousal (and attention): “Anything less is too boring to attract the attention of television audiences.” But it also rubs viewers the wrong way. Second, extreme closeness tends to magnify whatever we feel about the person we are close to; if somebody you dislike stands very close to you, you will dislike them even less.

Given these two facts, televised discourse could either increase or decrease viewers’ feelings about the opposition’s legitimacy. Mutz gives three specific hypotheses:

1. Extreme close-ups and incivility will both increase emotional arousal in viewers.
2. This increased arousal will increase how well viewers recall arguments that debate participants make.
3. Extreme close-ups will interact with incivility; “close-up camera perspectives will intensify viewers’ reactions to opposition political arguments and candidates.”

Note that the latter two hypotheses are not interesting unless the first hypothesis is correct.

Experimental Evidence

Adult volunteers watch a televised debate between two candidates in an open race for Congress in a distant state

In reality, the candidates are paid actors. They film their debate twice, using the same script both times, but in one version, they behave less civilly (rolling their eyes, interjecting comments like “You have completely missed the point here!”, and so on). Each of the two versions was shot simultaneously from both a close-up and a medium zoom. Thus, volunteers see one of four versions: Close-up/civil, close-up/uncivil, medium/civil, medium/uncivil.

Participants take a pre-test to assess their views. The previously recorded debate includes policy statements about eight separate issue areas. Mutz is primarily interested in how participants react to the “candidate” whose positions differ from the participant’s.

Experiment 1, Hypothesis 1

Using a subset of participants, experiment 1 is used to test hypothesis 1. As expected, emotional arousal (as measured by skin conductance levels) varies significantly across the four conditions. From greatest to least arousal, these is how the conditions were ranked:

1. Uncivil close-up
2. Uncivil medium
3. Civil close-up
4. Civil medium

This result confirms hypothesis 1.

Experiment 2, Hypothesis 2

In experiment 2, participants filled out a post-viewing questionnaire asking them to list all the arguments they could remember for each side of the debate. The purpose was to test hypothesis 2.

Incivility and extreme close-ups interacted. Viewers exposed to both remembered significantly more opposition arguments than viewers in the other groups.

Experiment 2, Hypothesis 3

Also in experiment 2, participants indicated on feeling thermometers their feelings toward each candidate. Mutz examines viewer polarization–that is, the difference in affect towards the preferred and opposition candidate.

Again, there was an interaction. For viewers who saw the medium-zoom, civility made no difference. But for viewers who saw the close-up version, civility decreased polarization while incivility increased it.

Mutz repeats this analysis with a different measure of opposition legitimacy: Each viewer’s evaluation of the strength of each candidate’s arguments. The same results obtained.

Final Comments

Mutz uses sound experimental methods. As with any experiment, it’s never clear how much these results translate into the real world. Still, I like this study, both for its interesting research question and its persuasive results. I would like to see these insights applied more directly to campaign advertising. Do campaign advertisers use these tactics? If so, we would expect to see close-up shots of the candidate’s opponent behaving uncivilly contrasted with close-up shots of the candidate smiling and behaving well. Presumably, this approach would increase animus toward the opponent among the candidate’s existing supporters, while decreasing dislike of the candidate among the opponent’s supporters.