A study was conducted to learn more about voters' use and perception of endorsements in the 1984 presidential election. Six interviewers were trained and then assigned to a random sample of precincts in Orlando, Florida, on the day of the 1984 presidential election. Each interviewer stopped every third voter and asked those willing to cooperate 12…

Political campaigns are major, high-budget marketing efforts, but because they are usually managed by people with little training in either marketing or communications, they fail to persuade voters to vote in the desired way. Political targeting can be treated as a segmentation problem, one of identifying and responding to the specific qualities…

Time of final vote decision in a national presidential election campaign was explored as the dependent variable in a media effects study conducted earlier as part of the National Election Study of 1980. Political identity, a new measure of partisanship and independence known as the Partisan Supporter Typology, was used as an important contingent…

Voting behavior of blacks is examined with specific regard to racial intolerance. Factors studied include racial identification, amount of interracial contact, and the black candidate's job performance. In 1969, interviewers collected data on 400 black respondents' attitudes about Carl Stokes (the black incumbent mayoralty candidate), the other…

This study investigated what changes in the television-personality and presidential images of the candidates would occur among first-time young voters due to the first presidential debate. Subjects, 116 18- or 19-year-old students at Purdue University, completed semantic differential forms, before and after the debate, which rated the concepts of…

Agenda setting provides an analysis strategy for linking press coverage and voter perceptions of front runners, and underscores the importance of studying the primaries early in an election year. Two studies were undertaken in 1976. The first study, in Onandaga County (New York), involved telephone interviews of 335 registered Democrats in late…

The usefulness of presidential debates to the electorate and to the total political system is evaluated in this paper. The paper first reports the results of opinion polls concerning the value of the 1976 debates and cites studies showing the types of information that people obtained from watching the debates. It then considers whether voters'…

For this study of the relationships between accuracy of political information and attention to various mass-media sources of public-affairs information, personal interviews were conducted with 388 eligible voters in Madison, Wisconsin, and 129 eligible voters in Lexington, Kentucky, during October 1972. Variables measured included education,…

In this study, two dimensions of political decisional agenda (the elements which relate most to voting decisions) were examined: the number of items on the agenda and the content of the agenda items. Data were gathered in a study of the 1974 congressional election in the five largest counties of Illinois' 24th Congressional District. A total of…

A study examined whether type of ownership affected editorial endorsement patterns and the impact of endorsements on voters. The endorsements of 51 California daily newspapers were tabulated for 25 statewide candidate races and 158 ballot propositions during elections of 1970, 1972, 1974, 1976, 1978, and 1980. Each endorsement was judged to…

This paper explores various aspects of voting behavior among nearly 900 British Columbia voters in the 1979 Canadian federal election. Specifically, the paper examines the aggregate significance of strategic choice in a voting situation and identifies factors which increase or decrease an individual's disposition to act strategically. Strategic…

Research indicates that the media play a role in shaping the information that voters have about election options. Knowledge of those options has been related to actual vote, but has not been shown to be strongly related to uncertainty. Uncertainty, however, does seem to motivate voters to engage in communication activities, some of which may…

The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to investigate the general image of women who are active in politics and compare that image with the general image of men who are politically active, (2) to examine the general area of sex-related voting patterns when a major woman condidate is involved, and (3) to determine whether or not a female…

During the recent election campaigns in the United States, speculative arguments about the use or the abuse of televised political spot commercials to "package" and "sell" the candidates to the public were widespread. With this popularly held belief in mind, the present study concerned itself with the reactions to and utilization of televised…

This paper explores single-issue politics by examining voting patterns on abortion and Equal Rights Amendment (E.R.A.) issues. The concept of single-issue politics refers to any issue which generates a significant amount of single-minded voting and/or political behavior. Major objectives of the study were to consider factors which were likely to…