Cooperative Issue Agendas in Congressional Campaigns

• In Event: Campaigns 1

Abstract

Much of the study of the dramatic growth of independent expenditure activity in U.S. campaigns has focused on the scale of this new spending. But our understanding of nature of these powerful new actors' relationship with candidates is still unclear. Do these outsiders represent independent interests injecting their issue agendas into campaigns or are they fully cooperative members of a partisan network? This paper offers a theory of compensatory cooperation between campaign actors where candidates and outside groups divide the labor of campaign messaging. Using an extensive dataset of campaign advertising in the 2008 through 2014 congressional elections augmented with Nielsen television ratings data it is shown that the sum of candidate and outsider advertising more closely matches the prevailing theories of campaign agendas than candidate or outsider advertising alone. In other words, outside groups do not mirror candidate agendas, but instead fill in the gaps in a cooperative system that yields a coherent overall campaign message. Paired with elite interviews of executives from party organizations, super PACs, and candidate campaigns, these findings describe how party networks can execute coherent campaigns despite legal barriers to direct communication with one another.

Author

• Kenneth M. Miller, University of Nevada, Las Vegas