Measuring Voter's Candidate Preference Based on Affective Responses to Election Debates

In this paper we present the first analysis of facial responses to electoral debates measured automatically over the Internet. We show that significantly different responses can be detected from viewers with different political preferences and that similar expressions at significant moments can have very different meanings depending on the actions that appear subsequently. We used an Internet based framework to collect 611 naturalistic and spontaneous facial responses to five video clips from the 3rd presidential debate during the 2012 American presidential election campaign. Using this framework we were able to collect over 60% of these video responses (374 videos) within one day of the live debate and over 80% within three days. No participants were compensated for taking the survey. We present and evaluate a method for predicting independent voter preference based on automatically measured facial responses and self-reported preferences from the viewers. We predict voter preference with an average accuracy of over 73% (AUC 0.779)

Priming Past the Primary: Mass Media, Issue Salience and Candidate Evaluation in a Race Governor

Past research indicates that voters have begun to rely less on party affiliations and more on candidates\u27 images and positions on issues in making voting decisions. Through using the mass media, voters can learn about issues and candidates, and form images of the candidates. Our study concerns the effects of mass mediated election news, and of political advertising, on voters\u27 choice of candidates. In particular, we examined the roles of media agenda-setting and priming, and of negative political advertising, in the development of voter’s evaluations of candidates. An important trend in agenda-setting research is to look beyond issue saliences as dependent variables to determine what relationships issue saliences have with other phenomena, such as public opinion and voting choice. Research into priming indicates that the issues and other aspects of political life (e.g., a candidate\u27s character) that become salient in an election are used by voters to evaluate candidates for public office, and therefore indirectly affect voting behavior. An analysis of a sample survey of eligible voters in the 1990 race for Wisconsin governor found that attention to news accounts of the election is associated with higher levels of salience given some issues in that election. In line with the priming model, issue salience had some, although modest, relationship to evaluation of the candidates. Political commercials, including negative ads, appeared to affect candidate evaluations more directly, while news media appeared to work through issue salience to affect evaluations of candidates. Some evidence was found of a \u27\u27boomerang effect of negative advertising in this campaign. Identification with political parties had only a small direct relationship to voting intention. Instead, this identification appears to work along with the direct and indirect effects of communication variables to influence candidate evaluation, which then appears to affect voting choice

Two-Stage Estimation of Non-Recursive Choice Models

Questions of causation are important issues in empirical research on political behavior. Most of the discussion of the econometric problems associated with multi-equation models with reciprocal causation has focused on models with continuous dependent variables (e.g. Markus and Converse 1979; Page and Jones 1979). Since many models of political behavior involve discrete or dichotomous dependent variables, this paper turns to two techniques which can be employed to estimate reciprocal relationships between dichotomous and continuous dependent variables. One technique which I call two-stage probit least squares (2SPLS) is very similar to familiar two-stage instrumental variable techniques. The second technique, called two-stage conditional maximum likelihood (2SCML), may overcome problems associated with 2SPLS, but has not been used in the political science literature. First I show the properties of both techniques using Monte Carlo simulations. Then, I apply these techniques to an empirical example which focuses on the relationship between voter preferences in a presidential election and the voter's uncertainty about the policy positions taken by the candidates. This example demonstrates the importance of these techniques for political science research

The Myth of the Level Playing Field: Knowledge, Affect, and Repetition in Public Debate

The industrialization of the channels and scale of communication has led some well-meaning reformers to try to regulate the ability of powerful private actors to leverage economic inequality into political inequality, particularly in the area of campaign finance. Such reform efforts are ostensibly intended to further the deliberative democratic ideal of rational, informed public decision making by preventing well-funded private interests from improperly influencing democratic debate and, by extension, political outcomes. This Article examines empirical findings in political science, psychology, and marketing and argues that, in the context of contemporary American society, the normative principles of deliberative democracy and formal equality operate at cross-purposes. Equalizing measures in campaign finance regulation are extremely likely to increase the divergence between actual political decision making and a deliberative, informed, rational ideal by increasing the incentives for speakers to mislead and manipulate voters or by entrenching preexisting majorities. This Article argues that, rather than focusing on equality of financing, reformers would do better to think about how to ameliorate the source of non-optimal political decision making: the (economically rational) political ignorance, non-rational decision making, and civic disengagement of the average citizen

1972 Presidential Campaign Investigation Based on Attitude Measurements of Candidate Images

The relationship of attitude measurement with the political campaign process provides the problem area that this study considers. The purpose of this political communication study is to explore in detail and describe various "attitude" profiles of voters and resulting candidate "images" of the 1972 presidential election. These "attitudes" and "images" are determined through the use of three primary research instruments: the semantic differential scale, the Method of Ordered Alternatives, and the political philosophy continuum. In addition to these, a record of actual voting behavior serves as validating support of the measured attitudes. This study deals with "attitudes" toward and candidate "images" of George McGovern, R. Sargent Shriver, Richard M. Nixon, and Spiro T. Agnew, the Democratic and Republican candidates for President and Vice-President in 1972. This descriptive investigation unfolds into three major problem areas: 1. to report and describe "panoramic images" of Nixon,. McGovern, Agnew, and Shriver, as measured by the semantic differential scale. 2. to give an account of voter preferred positions A through I as measured by the Method of Ordered Alternatives in connection with "attitude" as measured by the evaluative factor of the semantic differential scale, and subsequently aligned with actual voting behavior. 3. to determine the relationship between voters' own political philosophies and their perceived political philosophies of the four candidates as measured by the political philosophy continuum. The remainder of this chapter overviews the historical mileau of the 1972 presidential campaign, explains the research design and procedures, and offers an organizational preview of the remaining five chapters

Electoral change and voting behaviour in independent voters in South Korea, 1992-2002: Are independent voters rational in voting choice?

This study is about how independent voters make their vote decision in presidential election focusing on electoral behaviour in South Korea. The main argument of this thesis is that voters are not very rational in voting choice when party constraints are absent. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed in this study and provide a comprehensive analysis of voting behaviour of independent voters in the new democracy. In particular, the use of focus group interviews and in-depth one-to-one interviews conducted during the 2002 Korean Presidential Election provides detailed analysis of electoral behaviour in Korea. Korean voters have developed party identification, a long-term psychological attachment with a particular political party, under the institutional underdevelopment of the political parties in the new democracy. Regionalism is the predominant factor to explain partisan alignment in Korea, but ideological self-identification also accounts for the partisan alignment in new democracy. Over the last 10 years, party identification has markedly weakened in Korea, a 15 year old democracy, in contrast to experiences of other new democracies. This weakening of party identification is largely due to changes in political interest and dissatisfaction with political processes in new democracy. My findings confirm that the increase of independents and the process of partisan dealignment are closely related to a decline of electoral stability. But an increase of independent voters who are free from party constraints has not lead to an increase of rational voting behaviour in Korean presidential elections. Although independent voters are most interested in short-term considerations, such as candidate evaluation, issue stands and government performance, their voting choice is not politically rational. Independent voters are more likely to make vote decision based on insufficient information and heavily rely on candidate image rather than substance in their voting choice. Many independent voters cast their ballot based on the candidates' affective dimensions, such as integrity, empathy and appearance, rather than cognitive dimensions, such as competence to solve the nation's urgent problems

The State of the Parties (Seventh Edition)

Continuing a three-decade tradition, The State of the Parties 7th edition brings together leading experts to evaluate change and continuity in American electoral politics. Political parties in America have never been more contentious and divided than they are right now. Even splits within the parties themselves have the power to elevate relatively unknown candidates to power and topple established incumbents. With sections devoted to polarization and the electorate, polarization and political elites, tea party politics, super PACS, and partisan resources and partisan activities, the contributors survey the American political landscape. They pay special attention to polarization between and within the parties in the aftermath of the 2012 election, demographic changes to America\u27s political parties, the effects of new media and campaign finance laws on national and local electoral results, the Tea Party\u27s rise and, as always, the implications of all these factors on future policymaking and electoral prospects. The State of the Parties 7th edition offers an indispensable guide to American politics for scholars, students, and practitioners.https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/state_of_the_parties7/1000/thumbnail.jp

Clinton's performance in American public's eye: an exploration of media effects on presidential evaluation.

by Wan Fang.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-80).Abstract also in Chinese.Abstract --- p.iiAcknowledgments --- p.iiiChapter Chapter I --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter Chapter II --- Literature Review & Conceptualization --- p.3Chapter Chapter III --- Media Coverage & Hypotheses --- p.27Chapter Chapter IV --- Methods --- p.36Chapter Chapter V --- Results --- p.44Chapter Chapter VI --- Conclusions & Discussions --- p.57Endnotes --- p.65References --- p.69Figures & Tables --- p.7

SAFE: A Sentiment Analysis Framework for E-Learning

The spread of social networks allows sharing opinions on different aspects of life and daily millions of messages appear on the web. This textual information can be a rich source of data for opinion mining and sentiment analysis: the computational study of opinions, sentiments and emotions expressed in a text. Its main aim is the identification of the agreement or disagreement statements that deal with positive or negative feelings in comments or reviews. In this paper, we investigate the adoption, in the field of the e-learning, of a probabilistic approach based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) as Sentiment grabber. By this approach, for a set of documents belonging to a same knowledge domain, a graph, the Mixed Graph of Terms, can be automatically extracted. The paper shows how this graph contains a set of weighted word pairs, which are discriminative for sentiment classification. In this way, the system can detect the feeling of students on some topics and teacher can better tune his/her teaching approach. In fact, the proposed method has been tested on datasets coming from e-learning platforms. A preliminary experimental campaign shows how the proposed approach is effective and satisfactory