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Recent years have seen more and more research on campaign effects, likely due to increases in both campaign spending and data quality. This work has approached the electoral campaign from various angles: What types of voters are persuaded by campaigns? Why do certain issues garner so much candidate attention? Why do candidates employ certain tactics? While these questions differ (albeit in some cases very slightly), they are united by an overall goal--the effort to determine if (and how) campaigns matter. The Persuadable Voter and Attack Politics are the latest entries in this line of research and, at their core, both books attempt to solidify our understanding of the relationship between candidate strategy, campaign dynamics, and political outcomes.
Focusing on a campaign's role in voter decision making, The Persuadable Voter is an ambitious undertaking. In addition to analyzing the conditions under which campaigns will influence voters, D. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Shields also seek to leverage this understanding of voter behavior into an explanation of candidate strategy. It is the titular "persuadable voter," they argue, that leads candidates to highlight certain issues (or conversely, ignore other issues) on the campaign trail.
The book begins with a focus on voters. In particular, Hillygus and Shields argue that in any campaign there are "cross-pressured" voters--voters who must choose between competing considerations. One population of such voters are individuals who identify with one party but disagree with that party on an important issue (for example, Republicans who support stem-cell research or Democrats who oppose abortion). These cross-pressures create a unique possibility for persuasion when a candidate of the opposite party can pinpoint the issue at the heart of a cross-pressured voter's conflict and show that the candidate of the voter's own party is at odds with the voter on this particular issue. Activating these cross-pressures, the authors argue, can lead the voter to vote against their own party in a given election.
Using different data sources and...