NSF Award
1627431
General Summary<br/><br/>Electoral campaigns are a defining feature of democratic polities. Yet studying electoral campaigns and their effects has been difficult. With the support of prior National Science Foundation grants, the investigators have developed a theory of campaign communication and tested expectations using data from congressional campaign and members' official websites. The investigators extend their data collection to include the 2016 campaign and the 2015 and 2017 legislative sessions. A key component of the project is that it brings together campaign and legislative data. The PIs construct a publicly available dataset that includes coding of approximately 3,000 House and Senate campaign websites and roughly 300 official congressional websites, over sixteen points in time. These data include extensive information on candidates' backgrounds, districts, and campaigns, as well as data on television advertisements and media coverage. Extending the data is critical for further understanding how the public's growing technological sophistication affects what candidates and representatives present online. This project also provides opportunities to study campaigns and their effects on legislation and representation.<br/><br/>Technical Summary<br/><br/>Electoral campaigns are a defining feature of democratic polities. Yet studying electoral campaigns and their effects has been difficult. In recent work, the investigators have developed a theory of campaign communication and tested expectations using data from congressional campaign websites and members' official websites. The investigators have amassed a data set consisting of more than 2,500 website codings, from 2002 through 2014. These data have been used in scholarly projects by the PIs and many other political science investigators. The PIs will extend their data collection to include the 2016 campaign and the 2015 and 2017 legislative sessions. They will code sites over the course of the campaign, archive sites, implement surveys of campaign and official website designers, and code official member websites approximately one year after the campaigns. A major broader impact of the project is that the team of coders include only undergraduate students. These students gain valuable experience with empirical social science research. In the end, the investigators will construct a publicly available data set that includes coding of more than 3,000 web sites over multiple years. This project provides opportunities to study campaigns and their effects on legislation and representation.
