Incumbency and the News Media in U.S. Senate Elections: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract

Although our understanding of voting in Senate elections has increased considerably over the past decade, the exclusive reliance on survey data has limited the range of questions we have explored. Using a less traditional design, the present study expands our understanding of vote choice in Senate elections. This study combines two methods-a content analysis and an experiment-to examine the impact that news coverage and candidate status have on voters views of Senate candidates. The results of this study suggest that both campaign coverage and the candidate's status favor incumbents. First, current patterns of campaign coverage encourage people to develop more favorable impressions of incumbents. Second, people use incumbency as a cue to draw distinctions between identical incumbents and challengers, and these distinctions always favor incumbents.