OSPC 3085 - Political Campaigns, Persuasion, and Electoral Strategies

This course examines how political campaigns influence voter behavior and shape electoral outcomes, combining theory, data analysis, and fieldwork. In Part I, we focus on short-term campaign strategies in the weeks leading-up to elections, including mobilization efforts, persuasion tactics, the role of campaign volunteers, moral appeals in campaign messages, and how digital campaigning and micro-targeting are influencing campaigns. In Part II, we explore how parties pursue long-term influence by setting agendas and strategically taking positions. We also analyze voting behavior through models like rational choice, issue voting, partisan identity, and social cleavages. Part III applies these insights to real-world voter groups and major elections. Students conduct interviews with voters and design targeted campaign strategies based on data.

During two of the lab weeks, you are asked to write a brief report analyzing the data you are given. These assignments can be finished during lab (yet you may also take longer). You need to submit this brief report before the next class.

BLOCK I: ELECTION CAMPAIGNS (Weeks 1–5)

Focus: This part of the course focuses on the final weeks leading up to an election. We examine two core goals of short-term electoral strategy: mobilization—getting supporters to vote—and persuasion—changing voters’ minds. A dedicated lab week offers hands-on experience with experimental data that evaluates the effectiveness of these campaign tactics in real-world settings. We also explore who carries out campaign work, what motivates campaign workers, and how moral-value-based appeals are used to influence voter behavior.

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Week 1 – Party Activists and the Campaign Ground Game

• Topics: The role of activists and volunteers and their motivations. Enos, Kamphorst, and Gulzar discuss the motivations of party volunteers---often called ‘party activists’. What motivates them is an active debate without a final answer. Goyal highlights why it is important to study party activists.
• Activities: Class introduction & Lecture
• Readings:

o Enos Ryan, and Hersh Eitan. 2015. “Party Activists as Campaign Advertisers: The Ground Campaign as a Principal-Agent Problem. American Political Science Review.

o Kamphorst, Jonne, and Horacio Larreguy. Working paper. “Get Out the Volunteer: What Motivates Party Activists”

o Gulzar, Saad et al. (forthcoming). “Can Party Elites Shape the Rank-and-File? Evidence from a Recruitment Campaign in India”. American Political Science Review.

o Goyal, Tanushree. 2023. “Representation from Below: How Women’s Grassroots Party Activism Promotes Equal Political Participation.” American Political Science Review: 1–16.

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Week 2 – Moral Values and social media

• Topic: The effectiveness of making moral appeals, and how social media has changed the power of such appeals. Feinberg and Voelkel discuss moral reframing as a messaging strategy. Bail and Crockett discuss how moral outrage is amplified through social media.
• Activities: Lecture & designing moral appeals in Europe
• Readings:

o Feinberg, Matthew and Willer, Robb. 2019. “Moral reframing: A technique for effective and persuasive communication across political divides” Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

o Voelkel, Jan; Mernyk, Joseph and Willer, Robb. 2023. “Moral reframing increases support for economically progressive candidates” “PNAS Nexus.

o Crockett, Molly J. 2017. “Moral Outrage in the Digital World.” Nature Human Behaviour.

o Bail, Chris, et al. 2018. “Exposure to Opposing Views can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Social Media.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Week 3 – Using Experimental Campaign Data, Voter Mobilization & Lab week

• Topic: Introduction to experimental analysis and analyzing experimental data. Voter mobilization. Gerber provides an overview of different mobilization strategies.
• Activities: Lecture & hands-on analyzing of field experiment data on GOTV.
• Readings:

o Before class, make sure you have R-studio installed on your computer.

o Gerber, Alan S., and Donald P. Green. 2000. “The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment.” American Political Science Review.

o Enos, Ryan D., and Anthony Fowler. 2021. “Aggregate Effects of Large-Scale Campaigns on Voter Turnout.” Political Science Research and Methods.

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Week 4 –Persuasion part I: what is persuasion

• Technical in-class assignment from week 3 due
• Topic: Persuasion. When does it work and how does it work? Kalla (2021) provides a good theoretical and empirical overview of different persuasion strategies. Hewit and Kalla (2018) provide state-of-the-art evidence from large-scale studies on political persuasion. Pons provides evidence from Europe.
• Activities: Lecture & Class discussion
• Readings:

o Kalla, Joshua, and David Broockman. 2021. “Which Narrative Strategies Durably Reduce Prejudice? Evidence from Field and Survey Experiments Supporting the Efficacy of Perspective-Getting.” American Journal of Political Science.

o Hewitt, Luke, Broockman, David, et al. 2024. “How Experiments Help Campaigns Persuade Voters: Evidence from a Large Archive of Campaigns’ Own Experiments.” American Political Science Review.

o Kalla, Joshua, and David Broockman. 2018. “The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments.” American Political Science Review.

o Pons, Vincent. 2018. “Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France.” American Economic Review.

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Week 5 – Voter Persuasion part II: online advertising

• Topic: We focus on political persuasion in online spaces. Hager discusses whether online ads work in Europe. Tappin focuses on micro targeting.
• Activities: Lecture & Class discussion.
• Readings:

o Hager, Anselm. 2019. “Do Online Ads Influence Vote Choice?” Political Communication 36(3): 376–393.

o Tappin, Ben, Chloe Wittenberg, Luke B. Hewitt, and David Rand. 2023. “Quantifying the Potential Persuasive Returns to Political Microtargeting.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

o TBD

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BLOCK II: LONG-TERM STRATEGY (Weeks 6–10)

Focus: This part of the course explores how parties shape the voter landscape beyond a single election cycle—through agenda-setting, identity formation, issue positioning, and coalition strategies. We study how parties seek to define salient issues, shift long-term public opinion, and realign electoral bases. In addition, we talk about the canonical models of what determines how people vote.

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Week 6 – Agenda-Setting and Elite Influence on Public Opinion

• Topics: what determines what is on the political agenda and what is important to voters? What is the role of politicians in this process, and what about other actors in society? Wasow discusses the role of social movements. Valentim focuses on parties.
• Activities: Lecture & Class discussion.
• Readings:

o Wasow, Omar. 2020. “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting.” American Political Science Review.

o Valentim, Vicente. 2021. “Parliamentary Representation and the Normalization of Radical Right Support.” Comparative Political Studies.

o TBD

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Week 7 – Party Positioning and Strategic Ambiguity

• Topics: what determines party positions? How are parties strategic in this regard? Adams discusses party positions and how they’re influenced by the public, Abou-Chadi talks about how parties influence each other, Rovny and Kamphorst talk about why parties may not want to take a position in certain cases.
• Activities: Lecture & Class discussion
• Readings:

o Adams, James, Michael Clark, Lawrence Ezrow, and Garrett Glasgow. 2004. “Understanding Change and Stability in Party Ideologies: Do Parties Respond to Public Opinion or to Past Election Results?” British Journal of Political Science.

o Abou-Chadi, Tarik, and Werner Krause. 2020. “The Causal Effect of Radical Right Success on Mainstream Parties’ Policy Positions: A Regression Discontinuity Approach.” British Journal of Political Science.

o Rovny, Jan. 2012. “Who Emphasizes and Who Blurs? Party Strategies in Multidimensional Competition.” Party Politics.

o Kamphorst, Jonne. 2024. “Too Important to Ignore? Why Ambiguity and Broad Appeals Fail with Rising Issue Salience.” The Journal of Politics.

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Week 8 – Theories of voting and lab week I

• Homework assignment (30%) due
• Topic: the rational choice model of voting, issue-voting, and valence. In the standard rational choice model of voting, voters choose based on distance to candidates. The issue and valence voting models extend this. Valence voting focuses on what happens if all voters and parties have the same positions: people choose who they find more competent. Issue voting asks what happens if voters choose on more than one dimension and attach different salience to different dimensions. Tomz discusses standard candidate positioning, Adams and Mendes talks about issue salience. Petitpas and Abou-Chadi discuss competence.
• Activities: Lecture & hands-on experience with voter data using the German Election Study.
• Readings:

o Tomz, Michael, and Robert P. Van Houweling. 2008. “Candidate Positioning and Voter Choice.” American Political Science Review.

o Adams, James, Samuel Merrill III, and Roi Zur. 2023. “How Much Does Issue Salience Matter? A Model with Applications to the UK Elections.” European Journal of Political Research.

o Mendes, Mariana S., and James Dennison. 2021. “Explaining the Emergence of the Radical Right in Spain and Portugal: Salience, Stigma and Supply.” West European Politics.

o Petitpas, Adrien, and Pascal Sciarini. 2022. “Competence Issue Ownership, Issue Positions and the Vote for the Greens and the Social Democrats.” Swiss Political Science Review.

o For lab, we will look at data from (no need to read in detail): Abou-Chadi, Tarik, and Jonne Kamphorst. 2023. “The Limits of Issue Entrepreneurship: How the German Greens Failed to Win in 2021.” Electoral Studies.

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Week 9 – Theories of voting and lab week II

• Topic: Cleavages (Columbia model), partisan identity (the Michigan model). In these models of voters it’s not voters’ positions that matter, but their social background and the group they feel attached to (partisan identity). Alan discusses partisanship. Lipset is a classical article describing how voting behavior after the Second World War used to be determined by the specific social group someone was part of. Over the course of the last four decades these traditional party-voter ties have disappeared yet are increasingly replaced by a new cleavage: higher versus lower educated. Hooghe (2018) and De Jong (2024) talk about this. Hooghe (2024) focuses on a different aspect of education than level: what someone has studied.
• Activities: Lecture & hands-on experience with voter data using the German Election Study.
• Readings:

o Alan S. Gerber & Gregory A. Huber. 2009. “Partisanship, Political Control,& Economic Assessments”. American Journal of Political Science.

o Lipset, Seymour M and Rokkan, Stein (1967) “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments”, in Lipset and Rokkan Party Systems and Voter Alignments.

o Hooghe, Liesbet, and Gary Marks. 2018. “Cleavage Theory Meets Europe’s Crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the Transnational Cleavage.” Journal of European Public Policy.

o De Jong, Jona, and Jonne Kamphorst. 2024. “Separated by Degrees: Social Closure by Education Levels Strengthens Contemporary Political Divides.” Comparative Political Studies.

o Hooghe, Liesbet, Gary Marks, and Jonne Kamphorst. 2024. “Field of Education and Political Behavior: Predicting GAL/TAN Voting.” American Political Science Review.

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Week 10 – In-Class Midterm

• Technical in-class assignment from week 8 and 9 due

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BLOCK III: VOTER GROUPS AND CASE STUDY (Weeks 11–12)

Focus: Applying course concepts to real-world voters and elections.

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Week 11 – Working-Class Voters and Electoral Realignment

• Topics: How and why working-class voters have shifted their party preferences. Kuziemko, Kamphorst, and Cremaschi all give different explanations. Grossman discusses a contemporary case.
• Activities: Lecture & Class discussion.
• Readings:

o Kuziemko, Ilyana, Nicolas Longuet-Marx, and Suresh Naidu. 2023. “Compensate the Losers? Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the US.” NBER Working Paper No. 31794.

o Coy, Peter. 2023. “How Democrats Lost Voters With a ‘Compensate Losers’ Strategy.” The New York Times, October 19, 2023. Opinion section.

o Kamphorst, Jonne. “The Left Misunderstood: How Misperceptions About What is Important to the Left Benefit the Right” Working paper.

o Cremaschi, Simone, Paula Rettl, Marco Cappelluti and Catherine E. De Vries (2024) Geographies of Discontent: Public Service Deprivation and the Rise of the Far Right in Italy. First View at American Journal of Political Science.

o Grossman, Emiliano. 2019. “France’s Yellow Vests—Symptom of a Chronic Disease.” Political Insight.

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Week 12 – Election Case Study

• Topics: Re-capping everything we have discussed by deep diving into a recent high-profile election. We will do so with a guest who has worked in campaigns.
• Activities: Speaker & Lecture
• Readings:

o TBD

• Homework assignment 30%
• In-class mid-term 20%
• Technical in-class assignments 10%
• Final assignment 40%

The in-class midterm will consist of some multiple choice and open-ended essay questions.

The final assignment consists of three parts:

Part 1: Using the dataset from Weeks 8 and 9, select two different ‘voter types’ defined along three dimensions: education (high vs. low), geography (urban vs. rural), and income (high vs low). Identify these two voter profiles in the data and analyze how well the voting behavior of these groups of voters aligns with the three models of voting behavior discussed in class—rational choice, issue/valence voting, and the sociological/partisan identity models. Present any evidence you find that supports or challenges these models for each group. You may work together with others and help each other for this part of the assignment, but each of you should produce a unique essay.

Part 2: Identify and speak with real individuals who resemble your two chosen voter types. Engage them in a conversation about politics: What issues matter to them? How do they talk about parties, candidates, or elections? Compare their views with the patterns you observed in the data.

Part 3: Conclude by outlining what a tailored, persuasive campaign might look like for each of these voters, based on both your data analysis and real-world conversations. What short term messages should a party aiming to attract these voters pursue (rely on week 2 in block I), and what long-term strategies (rely on Block II)

The homework assignment requires you to analyze and criticize an existing election campaign. During class, you will be given information about a recent election and are asked to analyze its result. In your analysis, rely on theories about election campaigns and long-term party strategy. Finally, choose a party in this election and discuss what they should have done differently to get a better result.