Campaigning For The Vote

Election campaigning never stops. That is the new reality of politics and government in Canada, where everyone from staffers in the Prime Minister’s Office to backbench MPs practise political marketing and communication as though each day were a battle to win the news cycle. Permanent Campaigning in Canada examines the growth and democratic implications of political parties’ relentless search for votes and popularity and what constant electioneering means for governance. This is the first study of a phenomenon – including the use of public resources for partisan gain – that has become embedded in Canadian politics and government.

This book, in bringing together some of the leading international scholars on electoral behaviour and communication studies, provides the first ever stock-take of the state of this sub-discipline. The individual chapters present the most recent studies on campaign effects in North America, Europe and Australasia. As a whole, the book provides a cross-national assessment of the theme of political campaigns and their consequences.

The first edition of Get Out the Vote! broke ground by introducing a new scientific approach to the challenge of voter mobilization and profoundly influenced how campaigns operate. In this expanded and updated edition, the authors incorporate data from more than one hundred new studies, which shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls. Two new chapters focus on the effectiveness of mass media campaigns and events such as candidate forums and Election Day festivals. Available in time for the core of the 2008 presidential campaign, this practical guide on voter mobilization is sure to be an important resource for consultants, candidates, and grassroots organizations. Praise for the first edition: "Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber have studied turnout for years. Their findings, based on dozens of controlled experiments done as part of actual campaigns, are summarized in a slim and readable new book called Get Out the Vote!, which is bound to become a bible for politicians and activists of all stripes." —Alan B. Kreuger, in the New York Times "Get Out the Vote! shatters conventional wisdom about GOTV." —Hal Malchow in Campaigns & Elections "Green and Gerber's recent book represents important innovations in the study of turnout."—Political Science Review "Green and Gerber have provided a valuable resource for grassroots campaigns across the spectrum."—National Journal

Campaigning for the Vote tells, in her own words, the efforts of a working suffragist to convert the men and women of England to the cause of women's suffrage. The detailed diary kept all her life by Kate Parry Frye (1878-1959) has been edited to cover 1911-1915, years she spent as a paid organiser for the New Constitutional Society for Women's Suffrage. With Kate for company we can experience the reality of the `votes for women' campaign as, day after day, in London and in the provinces, she knocks on doors, arranges meetings, trembles on platforms, speaks from carts in market squares, village greens, and seaside piers, enduring indifference, incivility and even the threat of firecrackers under her skirt. Kate's words bring to life the world of the itinerant organiser - a world of train journeys, of complicated luggage conveyance, of hotels - and hotel flirtations - of boarding houses, of landladies, and of the `quaintness' of fellow boarders. This was not a world to which she was born, for her years as an organiser were played out against the catastrophic loss of family money and enforced departure from a much-loved home. Before 1911 Kate had had the luxury of giving her time as a volunteer to the suffrage cause; now she depended on it for her keep. No other diary gives such an extensive account of the working life of a suffragist, one who had an eye for the grand tableau - such as following Emily Wilding Davison's cortège through the London streets - as well as the minutiae of producing an advertisement for a village meeting. Moreover Kate Frye gives us the fullest account to date of the workings of the previously shadowy New Constitutional Society for Women's Suffrage. She writes at length of her fellow workers, never refraining from discussing their egos and foibles. After the outbreak of war in August 1914 Kate continued to work for some time at the society's headquarter, helping to organise its war effort, allowing us to experience her reality of life in war-time London.

Elections are at the heart of our democracy. Understanding citizens’ decisions to vote or to abstain in elections is crucial, especially when turnout is declining. In this book, André Blais and Jean-François Daoust provide an original and elegant model that explains why people vote, based on four factors: political interest, sense of civic duty, perceived importance of the election, and ease of voting. Their findings are strongly supported by empirical evidence from elections in five countries. The analysis is compelling and demonstrates the power of their model to provide a provocative and parsimonious explanation of voter turnout in elections.

Cet ouvrage couvre la période qui va de 1758 à nos jours.

Capturing Campaign Effects is the definitive study to date of the influence of campaigns on political culture. Comprising a broad exploration of campaign factors (debates, news coverage, advertising, and polls) and their effects (priming, learning, and persuasion), as well as an impressive survey of techniques for the collection and analysis of campaign data, Capturing Campaign Effects examines different kinds of campaigns in the U.S. and abroad and presents strong evidence for significant campaign effects. "Capturing Campaign Effects is an accessible and penetrating account of modern scholarship on electoral politics. It draws critical insights from a range of innovative analyses." --Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan "What a wonderful way to usher in the new era of election studies! This book spotlights fascinating paradoxes in the literature of voting behavior, highlights many promising approaches to resolving those paradoxes, and shows how these strategies can yield important findings with terrific payoffs for our understanding of contemporary democracy. Fasten your seatbelts, folks: scholarship on elections is about to speed up thanks to this collection of great essays." --Jon Krosnick, Stanford University "The past decade has seen a renewed interest in understanding campaign effects. How and when do voters learn? Does the election campaign even matter at all? Capturing Campaign Effects draws on leading political scientists to address these matters. The result is a collection that will become the major reference for the study of campaigns. The lesson that emerges is that campaigns do affect voter decision making, usually for the better." --Robert S. Erikson, Columbia University Henry E. Brady is Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, and Director of the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Richard Johnston is Professor and Head of Political Science and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.