Reevaluating Spending in Gubernatorial Races: Job Approval as a Baseline for Spending Effects

Research on campaign spending has tried to resolve the issue of differential effects for incumbent and challenger spending. This analysis offers two new perspectives to the spending effects literature: (1) It extends the scope of this research to include gubernatorial elections, and (2) it uses job approval ratings to control for governors’ popularity. This approval measure sets a pre-campaign baseline for the expected vote that keeps campaign variables from being credited with pre-existing levels of incumbent popularity. A two-stage least squares (TSLS) analysis of two decades of gubernatorial races shows that incumbent spending (unlike challenger spending) does not have a significant effect on the vote. If incumbent spending wins little new support in the course of campaigns, generous public funding for statewide candidates will boost spending by challengers without reducing challenger competitiveness via higher incumbent spending

Money and Challenger Emmergence in Gubernatorial Primaries

Compared to congressional elections, gubernatorial races are underrepresented in the campaign finance literature. At the same time, the great diversity of state campaign finance laws enables a comparative analysis of their impact in gubernatorial races. I use data from 1980 to 2000 to test hypotheses about challenger emergence, campaign finance laws, and candidate spending in gubernatorial party primaries. I find that incumbents with high job approval ratings and those in party endorsement states are more likely to be unopposed in the primary. In contested primaries, experienced challengers and those who accept public funding are better able to match levels of spending by incumbents. The findings shed light on the dynamics of challenger emergence and the potential for public funding programs to make elections more competitive

The Pedagogical Value of Polling: A Coordinated 2012 Exit Poll Project across Diverse Classrooms

Several previous studies have demonstrated that student exit polling has educational value and promotes civic engagement (Berry and Robinson 2012, Evans and Lagergren 2007, Lelieveldt and Rossen 2009, and others). The authors of this paper have created assignments and an instructor\u27s manual on running student exit polls in undergraduate courses. Three institutions used these assignments during the fall 2012 semester. Working together, these instructors created an opportunity for their students to participate collaboratively with others in survey design and data analysis. This effort further provided assessment data on the effectiveness of this pedagogical approach for student engagement outside of the classroom in different communities and course contexts. Student surveys measured the impact that this experience had on their understanding of their own community, their relationship to the national community, their understanding of survey methodology, and descriptive statistics. Do students learn more about their community or the scientific process? Does it matter whether the course is designed primarily around politics, statistics, or public opinion? This paper addresses these questions and how these effects vary across different types of students and classrooms