Chapter 15 Further Reading

The Minimal Effects Tradition

Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. Columbia University Press, 1944 (3rd ed. 1968). The founding document of the minimal effects tradition. Read the original rather than relying on summaries — the original text is far more nuanced than the "campaigns don't matter" caricature. Lazarsfeld was studying conversion, not total campaign effects, and was appropriately careful about scope.

Klapper, Joseph T. The Effects of Mass Communication. Free Press, 1960. A synthesis of the early media effects literature that systematized the minimal effects hypothesis across multiple communication contexts, not just political campaigns. Provides intellectual context for understanding how the Columbia school findings fit into broader communication research.

Zaller, John R. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge University Press, 1992. A landmark in public opinion research. Zaller's receive-accept-sample (RAS) model provides the most sophisticated account of how campaign communications interact with pre-existing beliefs and partisan cues. Demanding but essential for serious students of campaign effects.

The Experimental Renaissance

Green, Donald P. and Alan S. Gerber. Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout. Brookings Institution Press, 4th ed., 2019. Also relevant to Chapter 14, but the sections on persuasion effects and the discussion of research methodology are central to understanding Chapter 15's claims about what experiments have and haven't established.

Gerber, Alan S. and Donald P. Green. "The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment." American Political Science Review 94(3), 2000: 653–663. The foundational field experiment paper. Short, readable, and methodologically transparent. A model for how to report experimental results.

Kalla, Joshua L. and David E. Broockman. "The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments." American Political Science Review 112(1), 2018: 148–166. The most comprehensive meta-analysis of campaign persuasion field experiments. This paper reaches the sobering conclusion that average persuasion effects in general elections are near zero, while finding larger effects in primaries. Essential for calibrating expectations about what campaigns can accomplish.

Persuasion and Deep Canvassing

Broockman, David and Joshua Kalla. "Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing." Science 352(6282), 2016: 220–224. The foundational deep canvassing paper, showing large and durable attitude change from 10-minute perspective-taking conversations. Note: this was about attitudes on a policy issue, not vote choice — the application to electoral campaign persuasion requires some extrapolation.

Kalla, Joshua and David Broockman. "Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments." American Political Science Review 116(1), 2022: 1–17. Follow-up work extending deep canvassing findings. Shows that the technique generalizes across different issue domains and canvasser characteristics.

Advertising Effects

Huber, Gregory A. and Kevin Arceneaux. "Identifying the Persuasive Effects of Presidential Advertising." American Journal of Political Science 51(4), 2007: 957–977. The clever media market boundary design that identifies causal advertising effects. A model of using geographic discontinuities for causal identification in observational data.

Gerber, Alan S., James G. Gimpel, Donald P. Green, and Daron R. Shaw. "How Large and Long-Lasting Are the Persuasive Effects of Televised Campaign Ads? Results from a Randomized Field Experiment." American Political Science Review 105(1), 2011: 135–150. The definitive study of advertising effect decay. Shows both that effects exist and that they fade rapidly, with important implications for spending timing.

Agenda-Setting and Priming

McCombs, Maxwell E. and Donald L. Shaw. "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media." Public Opinion Quarterly 36(2), 1972: 176–187. The foundational agenda-setting paper. Short, readable, and influential beyond its specific methodological scope.

Iyengar, Shanto and Donald R. Kinder. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. University of Chicago Press, 1987 (updated ed. 2010). The experimental documentation of agenda-setting and priming effects in political communication. Methodologically innovative for its use of experimental manipulation of news content.

Petrocik, John R. "Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study." American Journal of Political Science 40(3), 1996: 825–850. The formalization of issue ownership theory. Useful alongside the agenda-setting literature for understanding how campaigns compete for issue terrain.

Incumbency Advantage

Gelman, Andrew and Gary King. "Estimating Incumbency Advantage Without Bias." American Journal of Political Science 34(4), 1990: 1142–1164. The methodological foundation for separating the components of incumbency advantage. Technically demanding but the conclusions are accessible without following all the math.

Jacobson, Gary C. The Politics of Congressional Elections. Pearson, 9th ed., 2015. The most comprehensive treatment of congressional campaign effects, with extensive discussion of incumbency, challenger quality, and money effects. An essential reference for anyone studying legislative elections.

Ground Game and Field Organizing

Darr, Joshua P. and Matthew S. Levendusky. "Relying on the Ground Game: The Placement and Effect of Campaign Field Offices." American Politics Research 42(3), 2014: 529–548. The systematic analysis of Obama field office placement and county-level outcomes. Raises important methodological questions about how to identify field organization effects in observational data.

Hersh, Eitan D. Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters. Cambridge University Press, 2015. An important study of how campaigns use voter file data to target their communications, with implications for both the practical effectiveness of targeting and the normative questions about voter privacy and democratic representation.