I have been interested in politics since I was a kid. I actually considered a career in journalism covering politics first, but decided that studying it as a political scientist would be more interesting. I love to learn, and felt being a college professor would allow me to continue learning, which it has. I think of myself as primarily interested in general political processes and methods for studying them. American politics is simply the context in which I do this work. There is also an abundance of data on American politics, as well as a great deal of diversity in American politics that makes it interesting to me.
In your book Campaign dynamics:the race for governor you examine the relationship between what candidates say on the campaign trail and how people cast their vote. How significant is campaigning, and how do leaders exploit the differences among voters?
Campaigns help define the choice that voters have on election day. Certainly many voters vote based on party identification, which suggests that a general election campaign between a Democrat and Republican won’t likely sway their votes. However, when there is balance between the two parties, these two groups largely cancel each other out. This leaves those open to being swayed by the campaign as the folks who are going to decide who wins.
My work suggests that campaigns are generally not about trying to persuade voters to change their minds on particular issues. Rather, campaigns are about defining what issues or factors are most important in the upcoming election.
If one candidate stands to win if most voters are thinking about the economy on election day while the other candidate stands to win if most voters are thinking about defense or military policy, then those two candidates should each be trying to define the choice in terms beneficial to them. If the first candidate can get the second candidate to talk a lot about the economy, the first candidate improves their chance of winning.
In a race against an incumbent, is campaigning as big a factor as the size of the incumbents treasure chest? In that line, does campaigning matter in the era of monied interests?
The ability to raise money is one advantage incumbents have, but they also have greater name recognition and resources from their office at their disposal. Something we often forget is that the incumbent must have been a strong candidate the first time they ran because they managed to win. The fact that an incumbent wins reelection does not necessarily mean that the election itself and the threat of competition doesn’t matter. That said, a challenger to an incumbent must make their case to the voters through their campaign. Lots of research suggests that the ability of the Challenger to raise and spend money during their campaign is particularly important. It is not the money itself that matters, but rather that it signals the quality of the challenger by showing them as someone in whom donors are willing to invest. It also signals the exposure a challenger is able to receive and the information from their campaign they are able to disseminate. Still, challengers face an uphill battle because incumbents only need to convince voters to stay the course. Challengers must convince voters to make a change and also that they represent the right change to make.
What would the layman find most interesting and accessible within your research?
Hard to say, but I would make two points. First, in the book you mentioned above, I think average citizens would find it interesting that candidates are trying to define the terms of the choice on election day more so than they are trying to persuade voters to change their minds.
Second, I have done a fair amount of research with my colleague and friend, Geoffrey Layman, on contemporary party polarization. We argue that polarization between the two major parties in the United States is not new, but rather quite normal. What is different now is that the parties seem to be polarized across multiple issue dimensions rather than just one. We believe this starts from opening the party system at the elite level to make it easier for different activist groups to move in and take over political parties. These groups then define the collection of issue stances that define their respective parties. Citizens who identify with one of the political parties begin to absorb these issue stances is wha
t it means to be a member of that party.
The expansion of political conflict across multiple issue dimensions is what we call conflict extension. In a paper I am working on with two graduate students, one current and one former, we present evidence that this process has extended partisan conflict beyond the realm of normal public policy. We conduct several survey experiments where we ask a random sample of citizens to evaluate potential job candidates, vacation sites, schools for their kids, and even new soft drink products. In all of these experiments, one group is given a general description of the item under consideration, while another group is given the same description that also includes an additional piece of information softly linked to one of the political parties. Time and again we find that people’s evaluations of these obviously nonpolitical choices are colored by their party identification if even a soft party cue is given. Other scholars are finding similar results, which we argue is the logical consequence of our original notion of conflict extension.
With all the funding in the world, what would you have researched and how?
This is a hard question because there are so many interesting puzzles to tackle and important substantive problems to address. Today, the topic that comes to mind centers on political conflict versus cooperation. A lot of research touches on this topic, but I still don’t think we have good understanding of the factors that promote conflict versus cooperation. I know from existing work that institutions can be organized to be more likely to promote competition or cooperation. What I am more interested in is the psychology of self-interested versus other-directed behavior within political environments.
Politics is a process of making collective decisions regarding the values that will be used to govern a group of people. By its nature, politics invites a competition between competing values. Nevertheless, sometimes that competition focuses on differences while at other times common ground can be achieved. I don’t think we have a good sense of what promotes a focus on differences compared to a focus on common ground. I think that would be a theoretically rich area for research that would also have important substantive implications.
If you were to give advice to a student thinking of pursuing a PhD American Politics, what advice would you give them?
I have numerous thoughts about this, and I am currently working on a larger manuscript offering advice from deciding to pursue a PhD is selecting a program through the early years of being an assistant professor. I think the most important advice for those thinking about pursuing a PhD is to understand that PhD is a research degree. Many undergraduate political science programs do not show students what it’s like to do research in the field. Majors like biology and chemistry do much better job of this for their undergraduates. Students considering a PhD in political science should try to get some exposure to doing research to see if they like it.
The other thing I would mention here is that successful pursuit of a PhD requires an inner drive and motivation. Professors will be there to help you, but this task requires that you have a passion for pursuing a PhD and the ability and willingness to put in the time and hard work that is necessary. Pursuing a PhD is more than a full-time job and there are no shortcuts.
The last thing I would say is that pursuing a PhD in becoming a professor is a path that opens you to criticism. Your research papers will be critiqued first by your faculty and eventually by those evaluating them for publication. You are also in front of students every day in the classroom who might challenge what you say and will be asked to evaluate you at the end of the semester. Thus, you need a level of confidence and an ability to accept constructive criticism in this line of work. Good graduate programs will help you develop that ability. That said, I have never regretted my decision to pursue a PhD and a career as a professor. I love the work, and I love sharing discoveries with students.