Publications

Banda, Kevin K. "Timing and Responsiveness in American Political Advertising Campaigns." Forthcoming at Social Science Quarterly.

• Objective: Though candidates for political office use their campaigns to appeal to voters, they are unable to do so uninterrupted. Prior research suggests that they must respond to the advertising strategies employed by their opponents when determining their own strategies. How does this responsiveness vary across the campaign cycle?

• Methods: I test how general election television advertising responsiveness varies over the course of the campaign cycle using data from 256 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial contests. 

• Results: The results of my analyses show that candidates’ overall, negative, and (to an extent) issue-based advertising strategies become less informed by their opponents’ strategies as Election Day approaches.

• Conclusions: These findings suggest that candidates use the early stages of their campaigns to find effective general advertising strategies and become less responsive to their opponents once they have done so. In other words, campaigns appear to stay on message to a greater extent as the campaign unfolds.

Banda, Kevin K. and Joel Sievert. "How Filibuster Rhetoric Informs Perceptions of Politicians." Forthcoming at Legislative Studies Quarterly.

• How does rhetoric about the filibuster inform people's views of political figures? We argue that support or opposition to eliminating the filibuster conveys information to citizens that they can use to assess a politician's ideological position. This information can also be used when citizens form affective evaluations of politicians, but its effects depend on people's partisan identities. We use a preregistered survey experiment - along with a secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data - to show that a candidate who says that the filibuster should be eliminated is viewed as being more liberal than a candidate who says that it should be protected or who says nothing. We further show that Democrats like candidates who use elimination rhetoric more than protection or no rhetoric while Republicans react in the opposite way. These results suggest that elite messaging about salient political institutions can fundamentally shape people's views of political figures.

Sievert, Joel, and Kevin K. Banda. 2024. "All Politics Are National: Partisan Defection in National and Subnational Elections." Social Science Quarterly. Vol 105(2): 180-192.

• Objective: While they were once viewed as largely local or candidate-centered contests, recent American elections have come to be dominated by national forces such as presidential politics and partisanship. Prior research on voter behavior in this new era of nationalized politics, however, has largely focused on more high-profile contests and has not examined voter decision making across multiple levels of government.

• Methods: Our study uses cross-sectional (2006–2020) survey data from the Cooperative Election Study to explore the determinants of partisan loyalty and defection across both national and subnational American elections.

• Results: We find consistent evidence that citizens increasingly rely upon national forces—specifically partisan-ideological sorting and presidential approval—to make decisions about candidates up and down the ballot. We also find mixed evidence that evaluations of the national economy inform defection behavior.

• Conclusion: These findings indicate that the national political forces shape voter behavior in national and subnational contests in effectively identical ways. Thus, the evidence supports the notion that all (electoral) politics are now national.

Banda, Kevin K. and John Cluverius. 2023. ``White Americans' Evaluations of the Alt-Right.'' American Politics Research. Vol 51(4): 45-51.

• Citizens' perceptions of the alt-right are not well explored in political science. We view the alt-right as a successor of the Tea Party movement. While the Tea Party described itself as organized around spending, the size of government, and the American Constitution, examinations of the movement found that the unifying concerns of people who identified with it or viewed it favorably were negative feelings about racial minorities and patriarchal views of gender roles. Using panel survey data, we show that whites with higher levels of hostile sexism, racial resentment, perceptions of discrimination against whites, and who were more favorable towards Donald Trump evaluated the alt-right movement more positively. We find no evidence that self-placed ideology informed these evaluations. On the whole, latent cultural conservatism appears to inform evaluations of the relatively unknown - at the time - alt-right movement.

Kevin K. Banda and Erin C. Cassese. 2022. "Hostile Sexism, Racial Resentment, and Political Mobilization." Replication materials. Political Behavior. Vol 44(3): 1,317–1,335.

• We argue that hostile sexism and racial resentment play an important and somewhat underappreciated role in American elections through their influence on voter turnout and engagement with political campaigns. The effects of these attitudes are not straightforward but depend on partisanship. We evaluate whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism cross-pressure Democratic partisans, resulting in lower levels of political participation. We further consider whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism bolster participation among Republicans. We find evidence of these divergent effects on the political mobilization of white voters using the 2016 American National Election Study. The results support our expectations and suggest that cuing resentment-based attitudes was an important strategy for engaging voters in the 2016 presidential campaign and will likely play an important role in future campaigns as well.

Banda, Kevin K. 2022. "Reexamining the Effects of Electoral Competition on Negative Advertising." American Politics Research. Vol 50(1): 45-51.

• Prior research suggests that campaigns become more negative when the election environment becomes more competitive. Much of this research suffers from data and design limitations. I replicate and extend prior analyses using a much larger number of cases. Using advertising data drawn from 374 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns contested from 2000 through 2018, I find evidence that electoral competition encourages candidates to engage in more negative advertising campaigns and that incumbency status conditions these effects. Incumbents of both parties use more negative messaging strategies as competition increases. The effects of competition among challengers and open seat candidates is mixed. These results add to what we know about campaign advertising behavior and suggest that researchers should take care to avoid ignoring important contextual factors that underlie candidates' strategic choices.

Kevin K. Banda. 2021. "Issue Ownership Cues and Candidate Support." Replication materials. Party Politics. Vol 27(3): 552-564.

• Issue ownership theory suggests that candidates should focus on the issues that are owned - or associated with - their parties and mostly avoid issues that are owned by the opposing party. Doing so allows them to focus on their own party's strengths rather than on their weaknesses. Despite this expectation, contemporary research finds that candidates discuss both their own party's issues and trespass by talking about issues owned by the opposing parties. I argue that issue ownership cues - subtle information cues linking candidates to parties through the discussion of party-owned issues - should have heterogeneous effects across partisan groups. Using a survey experiment, I show that copartisans prefer candidates who focus on issues owned by their parties while opposing partisans prefer candidates who trespass; independents' preferences do not appear to shift in response to these cues. It thus appears as if cuing people to connect candidates to one party or the other can inform citizens' levels of support for those candidates. Depending on the composition of the electorate, trespassing can be an advantageous strategy for candidates.

Kevin K. Banda, Thomas M. Carsey, and John Curiel. 2021. "Incumbency Status and Candidate Responsiveness to Voters in Two-Stage Elections Beginning with a Primary." Replication materials. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties. Vol 31(2): 263-281.

• Theories of representation suggest that candidates should respond ideologically to their constituency. Two-stage elections like those in the U.S. force candidates to decide which parts of their constituency they should respond to: citizens who are active enough to participate in primaries or those who only participate in general elections. We posit that non-incumbent candidates should mostly focus on the preferences of primary voters while incumbents should be largely unmoved by the preferences of either set of voters. We test these expectations using data from U.S. House and Senate contests and find support for our theory. Our results suggest that scholars should pay closer attention to the two-stage nature of U.S. elections when evaluating electoral responsiveness.

Banda, Kevin K. and Jason H. Windett. 2021. "Candidate Appearance in Campaign Advertisements." Electoral Studies. Vol 70(1): 102275.

• Many scholars have examined the nature of campaign advertising strategy across differing contexts in U.S. elections. Little attention has been devoted to exploring the incentives that candidates face to appear - or not - in their own advertisements. We argue that candidates should seek to distance themselves from potential backlash stemming from more negative messages by not appearing in negative ads. We also expect that candidates should be more likely to appear in advertisements aired during primary elections relative to general elections because candidates should use ads in this election stage to introduce themselves to voters. Furthermore, incumbents should be less likely to appear in ads than other candidates because their constituents should not need to be introduced to them. Data on candidate-sponsored television advertisements collected across four years for four different offices provides support for our expectations and suggests that candidates make strategic decisions about when to appear in advertisements.

John Cluverius, Kevin K. Banda, and Hannah R. Daly. 2020. "How the Alt-Right Label Informs Political Assessments." Social Science Quarterly. Vol 101(5): 1699-1711.

• By the end of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the alt-right label came to newfound political prominence. To what extent does labeling someone as a member of the alt-right inform people's assessments of that person? Given that the alt-right is largely a far-right movement, we argue that people should assess alt-right candidates as holding more conservative ideological and issue positions. We use a survey experiment that tasks participants with assessing the ideological and issue positions of a candidate. Our results suggest that the alt-right label leads people to assess candidates as holding more conservative ideological and issue positions relative to no label and often relative to a more explicit conservative label. These results help us to grasp how citizens understand this relatively new far-right group's preferences.

Kevin K. Banda, Thomas M. Carsey, and Serge Severenchuk. 2020. "Evidence of Conflict Extension in Partisans' Evaluations of People and Inanimate Objects." Replication materials. American Politics Research. Vol 48(2): 275-285.

• Prior research shows that partisan bias affects evaluations of people in non-political settings, but it is unclear to what extent this bias informs evaluations of objects other than people in similar contexts. This is an important limitation given the frequency with which brands, locations, and products are associated with parties and political figures. We examine whether partisan bias influences evaluations of inanimate objects in the same way that it does evaluations of people. The results of four survey experiments show that partisans evaluate objects linked to the opposing party less favorably than otherwise identical non-partisan objects. Moreover, the influence of partisan bias on evaluations of people is comparable in magnitude to the influence of bias on evaluations of various inanimate objects. We interpret these findings through the lens of conflict extension theory by suggesting that conflict between partisans has extended from policy-based to social identity-based conflict even in non-political settings.

Searles, Kathleen and Kevin K. Banda. 2019. "But Her Emails! How Journalistic Preferences Shaped Election Coverage in 2016." Journalism. Vol 20(8): 1052-1069.

• While existing work explains how journalists use news values to select some stories over others, we know little about how stories that meet newsworthiness criteria are prioritized. Once stories are deemed newsworthy, how do journalists calculate their relative utility? Such an ordering of preferences is important as higher-ranked stories receive more media attention.  To better understand this aspect of gatekeeping, we propose a model for rational journalistic preferences which describes how journalists rank-order stories.  When faced with competing newsworthy stories, such as in an election context, the model can be used to generate expectations regarding aggregate news coverage patterns.  By way of illustration, we draw on a unique case – the U.S. 2016 presidential election – in which we can explain how reporters order news stories by observing changes in the volume of newsworthy stories (e.g. scandal and the horse race).  Our content data includes sentence-level measures of coverage featuring Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on Fox News, NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC over 31 weeks.  We find that the rational journalistic preference model explains the imbalance of scandal coverage between the two candidates, and the dominance of horse race coverage.  In 2016, such preferences may have inadvertently contributed to a balance of news stories that favored Trump.

Justin H. Kirkland and Kevin K. Banda. 2019. “Perceived Ideological Distance and Trust in Congress.” Replication materials. Social Science Quarterly. Vol 100(5): 1,810-1,827.

• We offer a theory connecting a citizen’s trust in Congress with the perceived ideological distance between that citizen and her representative. We argue that citizens perceive of their representatives as agents acting on their behalf and, much like other principal-agent dynamics, trust Congress at higher levels the more their agents behave as citizens wish them to. Further, we argue that this relationship is conditional. Citizens of the controlling party in Congress have less need for faithful agents before Congress, owing to the fact that their policy wishes are likely to be implemented regardless of the behavior of their own personal agent. Citizens of the out-party in Congress only have the chance to have their policy preference enacted so long as their agents are faithful representatives. We test this conception of trust in Congress using survey data from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and find robust support for our theory. Out-party respondents’ trust in Congress is strongly affected by their perception of the ideological distance between themselves and their representatives, while in-party respondents’ trust in Congress was unaffected by the behavior of their own representative. We further find no evidence suggesting that legislators’ roll call voting – behavioral congruence with respondents – affects citizens’ trust in Congress.

Jonathan Kropko and Kevin K. Banda. 2018. "Issue Scales, Information Cues, and the Proximity and Directional Models of Voter Choice." Appendix. Replication materials. Political Research Quarterly. Vol 71(4): 772-787.

• One of the most important questions in the study of democratic politics centers on how citizens consider issues and candidate positions when choosing whom to support in an election. The proximity and directional theories make fundamentally different predictions about voter behavior and imply different optimal strategies for candidates, but a longstanding literature to empirically adjudicate between the theories has yielded mixed results. We use a survey experiment to show that how candidates' positions are communicated contain unacknowledged cuing effects that can encourage citizens to choose a candidate that is preferred under the expectations of either the proximity or the directional theory. We find that directional voting is more likely when the issue scale is understood to represent degrees of intensity with which either the liberal or the conservative side of the issue is expressed and that proximity voting is more likely when an issue scale is understood to be a range of policies.

Kevin K. Banda and John Cluverius. 2018. "Elite Polarization, Party Extremity, and Affective Polarization." Appendix. Replication materials. Electoral Studies. Vol 56(1): 90-101.

• Elites in the U.S. have become increasingly polarized over the past several decades. More recently, the degree to which partisans view the opposing party more negatively than their own - a phenomenon called affective, or social, polarization - has increased. How does elite polarization inform affective polarization? We argue that partisans respond to increasing levels of elite polarization by expressing higher levels of affective polarization, i.e. more negative evaluations of the opposing party relative to their own. Motivated reasoning further encourages partisans to blame the opposing party more than their own. Results from surveys collected from 1978 through 2016 provide strong support for our theory. We further find that increasing levels of political interest magnify the relationship between elite and affective polarization. These results produce important implications for the health of democratic systems experiencing high levels of elite polarization.

John Cluverius and Kevin K. Banda. 2018. "How Trust Attitudes Promote Grassroots Lobbying in the American States." Social Science Quarterly. Vol 99(3): 1,006-1,020.

• Objectives: Despite declining trust in government institutions, political scientists have ob- served increasing political participation across activities, including grassroots lobbying. We argue that higher levels of trust in the state political system as a whole — diffuse political trust — and in state legislatures — specific political trust — should increase the likelihood that citizens contact their state legislators about policy matters because higher levels of trust tend to correlate with believing that the policymaking process produces equitable political outcomes. Methods: We use observational data from a a nationally representative survey sample taken in 2015. Results: We find mixed results: whereas diffuse political trust predicts participation in grass- roots lobbying at the state level, specific political trust does not. Conclusion: This finding implies that more general feelings of political trust exert greater influence on grassroots lobbying behavior than do more institution-specific indicators of trust.

Kevin K. Banda and Justin H. Kirkland. 2018. "Legislative Party Polarization and Trust in State Legislatures." Appendix. American Politics Research. Vol 46(4): 596-628.

• We argue that citizens' trust attitudes are inversely related to party polarization because polarization tends to encourage political conflict, which most people dislike. We further posit that partisans’ trust attitudes are driven by the ideological extremity of the opposing and their own parties for similar reasons. Using roll-call based estimates of state legislative party polarization and public opinion data collected in 2008, we show strong evidence in favor of our theory: higher levels of party polarization within legislative chambers depresses citizens' trust in their legislatures. Among partisans, we also find that trust attitudes respond to the ideological extremity of the opposing party, but not to a citizen's own party's extremity. We further find that as citizens' interest in politics increases, they react more strongly to polarization when forming their trust attitudes. Finally, partisans become less responsive to the ideological extremity of the opposing party as they become more politically interested.

Kevin K. Banda. 2016. “Issue Ownership, Issue Positions, and Candidate Assessment.” Appendix. Replication materials. Political Communication. Vol 33(4): 651-666.

• I argue that citizens alter their views of candidates' ideological and issue positions in response to two kinds of information cues: issue ownership and issue position cues. Issue ownership cues associate a candidate with the party that owns the issue discussed by a candidate. Issue position cues associate a candidate with the party that is linked to the position that the candidate discusses. These cues can either lead citizens to view the candidate as more or less extreme - both in terms of ideological and issue position assessments - than that candidate's party. When both types of cues are present, citizens should ignore the issue ownership cues in favor of the easier to process issue position cues. Evidence from a survey experiment embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study provides strong support for this theory and suggests that issue ownership can convey positional information.

Kevin K. Banda and Jason H. Windett. 2016. "Negative Advertising and the Dynamics of Candidate Support." Appendix. Replication materials. Political Behavior. Vol 38(3): 747-766.

• Campaigns are inherently dynamic events that unfold over the course of many weeks, but comparatively little work has examined these dynamics. Additionally, much of the research on negative campaigning has focused on the effects of negativity strictly on citizens. We argue that candidates’ negative campaign strategies are informed by the strategies employed by their opponents and their standing in the polls. Candidates, then, should respond to their opponents in order to rebut criticisms and retaliate against their opponents’ attacks. We further argue that the levels of support enjoyed by the candidates is also influenced by their negative campaigning strategies. Public opinion should be responsive to the strategies employed by candidates because citizens should update their assessments of candidates in response to the information to which they are exposed. We test our theories using data drawn from 80 statewide elections — 37 gubernatorial and 43 U.S. Senate contests — from three election years and public opinion polling collected during the last 12 weeks of each campaign. We find that candidates respond to increases in the number of negative advertisements aired by their opponents by airing more negative spots of their own and that the support enjoyed by a candidate decreases as the number of negative ads run by that candidate increases. We further find that candidates’ negative advertising strategies are not informed by their level of support in the polls.

Kevin K. Banda and Thomas M. Carsey. 2015. “Two Stage Elections, Strategic Candidates, and Agenda Convergence.” Appendix. Replication materials. Electoral Studies 40(1): 221-230.

• Candidates employ strategies in two stage elections that depend on the electoral circumstances they face. In competitive primaries, candidates must satisfy their party’s electorate before they shift their focus to the electorate as a whole. Candidates who do not face competitive primaries, on the other hand, are free to run a single campaign designed to appeal to the entire electorate across both stages of the election. Our analysis of U.S. Senate campaigns shows that candidates respond to the television advertising behavior of the candidates they are running against in their own primary by converging and to the behavior of candidates running in the opposing party’s primary by diverging.

Kevin K. Banda. 2015. “Competition and the Dynamics of Issue Convergence.” American Politics Research. Vol 43 (5): 821-845.

• Issue convergence theory suggests that candidates should respond to their opponents by discussing the same issues while issue divergence theory posits that candidates should instead ignore each other and discuss different issues. Recent studies tend to find evidence in favor of issue convergence, but these results may be inaccurate because the analyses that generated them tested dynamic campaign behavior using cross-sectional methods. Using a dynamic modeling strategy along with television advertising data drawn from 93 U.S. Senate campaigns in 44 states, five election years, and on 51 issues, I show that candidates increase the attention they devote to issues as their opponents' emphasis of these same issues increases and that candidates do so to a greater extent in competitive than in noncompetitive elections. This analysis is the first to account for the dynamic nature of issue emphasis and provides support for issue convergence theory.

Kevin K. Banda. 2014. “Negativity and Candidate Assessment.” Public Opinion Quarterly. Vol 78 (3): 707-720.

• Citizens are exposed to a great deal of information during election campaigns, much of which takes the form of cues about candidates' positions on issues. This research examines how citizens respond to information cues embedded in negative messages made by candidates about their opponents. Specifically, I look at how such cues influence how citizens view both the target and the sponsor of the attack. Citizens use these cues in two ways: (1) they assess the target of the message as holding more extreme ideological and issue positions in line with the attack while (2) their assessments of the negative message's sponsor shift in the opposite direction. Using data drawn from a survey experiment, I show that participants respond to the informational cues embedded in negative messages by shifting their assessments of both the attacker and the target. I find little evidence that shared partisanship between citizens and candidates conditions the way that citizens respond to these cues.

Kevin K. Banda. 2013. “The Dynamics of Campaign Issue Agendas.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly. Vol 13 (4): 446-470.

• I argue that candidates shape their issue agendas — the sets of issues on which they focus — in part in response to the issue agendas of their opponents. I further argue that competitive campaigns stimulate candidates to respond to one another at higher rates. I test my theory of candidate interaction using weekly advertising data at the media market level from 146 state-wide elections — 54 gubernatorial and 92 U.S. Senate contests — from six election years and across all 50 states. I find that candidates systematically respond to one another’s agendas and do so to a greater extent in competitive elections than they do in noncompetitive elections.

Jason H. Windett, Kevin K. Banda, and Thomas M. Carsey. 2013. “Racial Stereotypes, Racial Context, and the 2008 Presidential Election.” Politics, Groups, and Identities. Vol 1 (3): 349-369.

• As the first African-American nominee for President of a major political party, Barack Obama’s campaign and ultimate victory reminded voters, scholars, pundits, and the press of the centrality of race in American political life.  Speculation by observers of all types centered around the potential impact of race as an individual psychological prejudice and/or as a geographic/contextual factor.  These two themes parallel different leading scholarly treatments of race and racism in the U.S.  Rather than choose one theme or the other, in this paper we bring both traditions together in a unified analysis of white voter response to Obama.  We find strong evidence that the level of prejudice toward African-Americans held by whites affected their evaluations of Obama as well as their probability of voting for him.  In contrast, we find little evidence that whites responded to the racial context of their immediate geographic environment.

Current Research

Banda, Kevin K. "Timing and Responsiveness in American Political Advertising Campaigns." Invited to be revised and resubmitted to Social Science Quarterly.

• Though candidates for political office use their campaigns to appeal to voters, they are unable to do so uninterrupted. Prior research suggests that they must respond to the advertising strategies employed by their opponents when determining their own strategies. How does this responsiveness vary across the campaign cycle? Using data from 256 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial contests, I show that candidates’ overall, negative, and (to an extent) issue-based advertising strategies become less informed by their opponents’ strategies as Election Day approaches. These findings suggest that candidates use the early stages of their campaigns to find effective general advertising strategies and become less responsive to their opponents once they have done so. In other words, campaigns appear to stay on message to a greater extent as the campaign unfolds.

Banda, Kevin K., John Cluverius, and Justin H. Kirkland. "Partisans’ Evaluations of Unconstitutional Legislative Activity

• In this research note, we examine whether public evaluations of a policy depend on the constitutionality of the process by which that policy was passed. We observe whether people’s views depend on accusations that a policy was passed in violation of a state constitution’s single subject rule, and whether the effect of that accusation depends on the party making the accusation. Results from two survey experiments — one using a low salience issue and the other using a high salience issue — suggest that citizens view policies less positively when those policies are realized through unconstitutional processes, even when the criticism is made by the opposing party (and thus, the policy is supported by their own party). These results suggest that while the party supporting a policy is a central feature of policy evaluations by the public, the process by which those policies are realized also inform evaluations.

Banda, Kevin K., John Cluverius, Lilliana Mason, and Hans Noel. "How the Progressive Label Affects Citizens' Views of Others."

• Despite increasing levels of ideological polarization among party elites, activists, and partisans, only Republican Party elites consistently and explicitly identify their ideological dispositions as conservatives. Democrats tend to shy away from calling themselves liberals and instead identify as progressives. What effect does this label have on how candidates and citizens are viewed? We argue that the progressive label communicates ideological information suggesting that the person associated with the label holds a more liberal ideological position, but less so than an explicit liberal label would suggest. We find strong support for our expectations using data drawn from two survey experiments. Our findings suggest that the progressive label offers candidates a strategic means by which to communicate their left-leaning ideological preferences while avoiding the unpopular reputation of the word liberal.