Campaigns and Elections

Players and Processes

Stephen K. Medvic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000479164
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Stephen K. Medvic's Campaigns and Elections is a comprehensive yet compact core text that addresses two distinct but related aspects of American electoral democracy: the processes that constitute campaigns and elections, and the players who are involved. In addition to balanced coverage of process and actors, it gives equal billing to both campaigns and elections and covers contests for legislative and executive positions at the national, state, and local levels, including issue-oriented campaigns of note.

The book opens by providing students with the conceptual distinctions between what happens in an election and the campaigning that precedes it. Significant attention is devoted to setting up the context for these campaigns and elections by covering the rules of the game in the American electoral system as well as aspects of election administration and the funding of elections. Then the book systematically covers the actors at every level—candidates and their organizations, parties, interest groups, the media, and voters—and the macro-level aspects of campaigns such as campaign strategy and determinants of election outcomes. The book concludes with a big-picture assessment of campaign ethics and implications of the "permanent campaign."

New to the Fourth Edition:

• Fully updated through the 2020 elections, looking ahead to the 2022 midterms

• Covers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 election as well as the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol

• Adds new sections in Chapter 3 on election integrity and the assessment of election administration

• Reviews recent Supreme Court cases on gerrymandering and faithless electors

• Expands coverage of social media as a source of news, of the increasingly partisan nature of the media, and of the role of media fact-checking in campaigns and elections

• Reorganizes the chapters on the various actors so that the chapter on candidates leads directly to the chapter on campaigns

• Fully updates the resources listed at the end of each chapter

1 Campaigns and Elections in American Democracy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003125099-1

Elections can occur without democracy, but democracy cannot endure without elections.

—Dennis Thompson, Just Elections¹

Elections in twenty-first-century America have been some of the most contentious, and fascinating, in the country’s history. Although technically the last election of the twentieth century, the 2000 presidential election took weeks to decide and was only settled after a controversial ruling from the Supreme Court. The 2002 elections took place in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and produced a rare result in which the president’s party gained seats in the House of Representatives during a midterm election. In 2004, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were becoming increasingly unpopular, threatening to unseat an incumbent president. Those wars would be part of the reason the president’s party lost control of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the midterm elections two years later. A global recession was the setting for the 2008 presidential election, in which the country’s first Black president was elected. Backlash against him, if not his policies, gave rise to the Tea Party movement, which helped Republicans win control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections. That movement laid the foundation for a reality-television star to win the presidency, despite losing the popular vote, in 2016. And in 2020, months of misleading claims about voter fraud and charges of a stolen election, made by the president himself, led to an insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol on the day Electoral College votes were being counted in Congress.

Whether as dramatic as elections have been in the United States over the last twenty years or not, elections are always among the most important political events in the life of a country. Even nondemocratic governments reinforce the value of elections by routinely using them to justify a regime’s existence. The 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union guaranteed “all Soviets of Working People’s Deputies, from rural and city Soviets of Working People’s Deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, inclusive, are elected by the citizens by direct vote.” Furthermore, elections were to take place “on the basis of universal … and equal suffrage by secret ballot.”² In practice, of course, the Communist Party controlled nominations, and candidates ran largely unopposed. More recently, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, garnered 100 percent of the vote in his 2014 bid for the Supreme People’s Assembly (but chose not to run in the 2019 parliamentary elections).³ In terms of raw numbers, nearly as many elections were held in dictatorships from 1946 to 2000 as in democracies. However, there were also significantly more dictatorships than democracies throughout the world between 1960 and 1990. When this disparity is controlled for, elections are found to have been held almost twice as often in democracies as in dictatorships.⁴ Nevertheless, that so many dictatorships have held elections will likely come as a surprise to many readers.

Although elections under totalitarian regimes and dictatorships may serve as propaganda, they are the sine qua non of democracy; without them, there can be no democracy. Indeed, one could argue that the degree to which a political system is democratic can be measured by the meaningfulness of its elections, although this point is debatable for a number of reasons. One such reason is that some scholars of democratization prefer to treat the concept of democracy as a dichotomous variable (i.e., a country either is or is not a democracy) rather than a continuous one (whereby a country is more or less democratic).⁵ According to this view, there can be no degree to which a political system is democratic: Either it is, or it isn’t. Even so, a political system would never be considered democratic if it didn’t hold elections.

Of course, elections, even in democracies, are no guarantee of democratic results. A majority may, for example, vote to curtail the rights of minorities. Or the majority may support a candidate or a party that doesn’t fully embrace democracy and all the checks on power it entails. For example, the rise to power, via elections, of illiberal political parties in Hungary and Poland suggests that democratic elections can very easily produce undemocratic outcomes. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s consolidation of power in Turkey suggests the same. And, regardless of the extent of his authoritarian tendencies, the election of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016, and his narrow loss in 2020, also calls into question the ability of elections to safeguard democratic norms.

Clearly, then, democracy requires more than elections. Among the additional requirements are free expression, the right to association and the freedom to create political organizations, unfettered access to information, and an array of other citizenship rights. Determining which of these is most essential for democracy is, of course, futile. Nevertheless, elections certainly can claim historical primacy over other democratic practices. Robert Dahl—a preeminent democratic theorist—noted that in the common pattern of development in the world’s “older” democracies, elections to legislatures arrived early in the creation of political institutions. “The practice of electing higher law making officials,” writes Dahl, “was followed by a gradual expansion of the rights of citizens to Dahl—a preeminent democratic theorist—noted that in the common pattern of development in the world’s “older” democracies, elections to legislatures arrived early in the creation of political institutions. “The practice of electing higher law making officials,” writes Dahl, “was followed by a gradual expansion of the rights of citizens to express themselves on political matters and to seek out and exchange information.”⁶ That is, elections came first and political rights—rights necessary to contest elections—came later.⁷

If a country is to have meaningful elections, it must also encourage competitive campaigns. When the laws of a country allow only one party to field candidates, for instance, we deem the country’s election outcomes illegitimate. If the media are not allowed to freely report on the records of the candidates or parties or if the voters are not allowed to openly discuss their preferences and the reasons for those preferences, we consider the level of democracy to be low or nonexistent.

However, even democracies face obstacles to hosting competitive campaigns. It is possible, for example, that two or more parties will be permitted to field candidates, but only one will do so. This effectively gives voters no choice at all. In other cases, voter turnout is quite low, which raises questions about the representativeness of election results. Campaign finance patterns, norms of media behavior, voter engagement, and various election laws may diminish the competitiveness of campaigns in otherwise democratic electoral systems.

Of course, no electoral system is perfectly democratic. Indeed, it is not entirely clear what it means to say that an electoral system is “democratic” because there are a number of competing models of democracy.⁸ Furthermore, democratic principles often come into conflict in designing the rules for campaigns and elections. Freedom and equality, for example, are in tension with respect to campaign finance regulations. According to some, candidates should be free to raise and spend as much as they would like to further their campaign efforts. Yet vast inequalities in campaign spending often give one candidate a distinct advantage over opponents. Thus, some have suggested that in the interest of fairness and equality, limits on campaign spending should be enacted, while others (including the US Supreme Court) believe that such limits would violate candidates’ First Amendment rights to express themselves freely.

This chapter explores the expectations we have for democratic campaigns and elections. It begins with conceptual clarifications of the terms campaigns and elections and identifies differences between particular types of campaigns and elections. The chapter then discusses the theoretical role of campaigns and elections in democracy and ends with a look at some ethical considerations.

What Are Campaigns and Elections?

People often use the term election as a catch-all to refer not just to the casting and counting of ballots but to the campaign leading up to the election as well. You might, for example, hear someone say, “That election was the nastiest in recent memory.” What the person means, of course, is that the campaign, not the election, was nasty. Unless voters fought with one another at the polling place, the election was probably quite civil. This point may seem like hairsplitting but, as will be clear throughout this book, it is useful to distinguish between the campaign leading up to an election and the election itself.

An election is a mechanism for making collective decisions. It provides a means of expressing individual preferences through the “vote.” However, “taking a vote” is not the same as “holding an election.” In using the term election, we typically assume that a relatively extended campaign will be conducted to try to influence the outcome of the election. Thus, when a local parent–teacher organization votes on which fundraiser to use this year, the members are not really holding an election (even if arguments for each alternative were entertained).

Usually, elections choose individuals to perform certain duties. For instance, boards of directors for corporations and nonprofit organizations hold elections to determine their leadership. Viewers choose the winner of The Voice by voting in what amounts to a nationwide election for a celebrity. Nevertheless, elections can also be held to determine a course of action for a group of people. For example, the National Labor Relations Board is empowered “to conduct secret-ballot elections so employees may exercise a free choice [as to] whether a union should represent them for bargaining purposes.”⁹

As noted earlier, elections are typically preceded by campaigns. A campaign is simply a concerted effort to win votes in an election. William Safire explains that the term is taken from military jargon, “where it was first used to denote the amount of time an army was kept in the field, and later a particular military operation.” It began to be used in a political context in England as early as the seventeenth century, and “the idea that politics is a form of combat remains.”¹⁰

The vast majority of campaign activity involves communication of one kind or another, and most of it is persuasive in nature. Candidates or groups need votes, so they make arguments that they hope will convince voters to support their cause. As we will see, they also contact voters to encourage them to participate in the election. Some organizations, however, may play the role of a disinterested third party that simply wants to inform voters so that they make a more educated decision at election time.

In this book, we will be concerned only with campaigns and elections that influence government in one manner or another. Most of our focus is on candidate elections, or those that select representatives to governmental office. However, we do occasionally address noncandidate (or “issue”) elections such as initiatives, whereby citizens may propose laws to the legislature, and referenda, in which citizens are asked to approve or reject legislation. An additional set of elections—including both recall and judicial retention elections—allow voters to decide whether an elected official should remain in office. A recall asks voters whether they wish to remove the official before their term ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Campaigns and Elections in American Democracy
• Chapter 2 Voting Rights and the US Electoral System
• Chapter 3 Election Administration and the Campaign Finance System
• Chapter 4 Political Parties
• Chapter 5 Interest Groups
• Chapter 6 The Media
• Chapter 7 Voters
• Chapter 8 Candidates and Campaign Organizations
• Chapter 9 Campaigns
• Chapter 10 Elections
• Chapter 11 The Permanent Campaign
• Bibliography
• Index