DO P O L I T I C A L C A M PA I G N S M AT T E R ? This question, like so many in political science, seems natural, important, and straightforward. Yet the answer founders on the difAculty of deAning both the subject and the predicate. What do we mean by political campaigns? How might they matter? This essay attempts to organize the study of campaigns by marking its boundaries and by ordering q...

T he all-encompassing goal of political campaigns is to maximize the probability of victory. To that end, every facet of a campaign is evaluated by how many votes an activity will generate and at what cost. To perform this cost–benefi t analysis, campaigns need accurate predictions about the preferences of voters, their expected behaviors, and their responses to campaign outreach. For instance,...

The collapse of the traditional social ties, the advance of the mass media and the advent of political marketing have altered the structure and the direction of electoral campaigns. Present-day media-mediated electoral campaigns are hotly debated. On one side are those who claim that campaigns simplify political reality, manipulate voters, encourage voting apathy and in the long run contribute ...

Social media as a trend in the Internet is now used as a medium for political campaigns. Author explores the advantages and social media implementation of any political party in Indonesia legislative elections 2014. Author visited and analyzed social media used by the contestants, such as: Facebook, and Twitter. Author collected data from social media until the end of April 2014. This article d...

Academic disciplines see research questions through the biases created by their presuppositions and preferred methods. Political science and communication are no different. In the past, political scientists more often focused on outcomes and the social and economic judgments that seemed to shape them while communication researchers have focused more intensely on the structure and content of the...

This paper presented a multimodal discourse analysis of some visual images in the political rally discourse of 2011 electioneering campaigns in Southwestern Nigeria. The data comprised purposively selected political visual artefacts from political rallies across the six Southwestern States in Nigeria (Osun, Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, Ogun, and Lagos). The data were analyzed using Halliday’s (1985) syste...