Decision making is a central concept in the study of both politics and organizations. Although much research has examined how individuals make decisions, there has been substantially less work on the consequences of these decisions. My dissertation focuses on two groups of decision makers, candidates running for office and public managers, and the effect of their decisions on the electorate and organization, respectively. The dissertation explores the impact of candidates' decisions regarding their campaigns on the electorate by examining campaign advertising during the 2000 Presidential Election. I focus on two candidate decisions. The first is to focus on certain issues as a way to prime the public to see the candidate as having certain traits, namely empathy, morality, and leadership ability. The second is to show voters that the candidate is like them by activating (i.e. priming) feelings of social identity among women, African-Americans, and Latinos. Using campaign advertising data and public opinion data, I analyze the effect of campaign advertising on voters' evaluations of the candidates to determine the effectiveness of these strategies. Results find that an effective strategy was for the candidates to air ads describing themselves as having certain traits. Talking about issues does not have much of an effect on voters' candidate evaluations. Appeals to women were not effective. Appeals to African-Americans were only effective for the Democratic candidate, and appeals to Latinos were only successful for the Republican candidate. I examine the decisions of public managers by focusing on middle level bureaucrats and the consequences of their decisions on their agencies. The agencies are public schools in Texas and the middle managers are principals. From a dataset of over 1,000 Texas school districts, I create a measure of principal quality which I then use to explore the impact of middle management on multiple school performance measures and to compare the influence of principals and superintendents on performance. I also examine the effect of principals within in the organization, namely how principals affect the turnover of the workers under them. Results find that principals have a direct and beneficial influence on organizational performance measures such as standardized test scores, college readiness, and turnover. To summarize the results more generally, the dissertation finds that the decisions actors make within the political process matter in important and significant ways.

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Democratic politics is a process where political elites compete for votes (Schumpeter, 1950) and therefore campaign communication is an indispensable area in it. In the beginning, campaign communication focused more on public policy promotion (Peng, 2005) and now is campaign-communication oriented to define communication strategies adopted in election campaign. Election campaign becomes fiercer after party politics takes root in Taiwan and that is where campaign advertising comes in. Purposes of campaign advertising by a candidate or party include image shaping, promotion of campaign issue and statement of political platform and achievements. We examined campaign literature of Democratic Progressive Party in 2010 Kaohsiung Mayoral Election and adopted Cognitive Continuum Theory (CCT) to analyze how appeal of campaign advertising influenced voter. Quasi-experiment was adopted. 45 questionnaires were issued to 45 participants individually due to the nature of the questionnaire. Results indicate that voters in Kaohsiung are more intuitive and support a candidate more because of the candidate¡¦s image than his/her platform. Reflect Kaohsiung voters' cognitive characteristics to be more intuitive. These cognitive characteristics show not only economic but serious social issues in Kaohsiung.

This dissertation explains how and under what conditions voters are affected by campaign advertising, taking particular account of the conditioning role played by political knowledge and ad tone. It builds on psychological research showing that people make regular mistakes in attribution, evaluation, and decision making; that they tend to give greater weight to negative than to equally credible positive information; that they better match their political choices with their interests and values when they are more politically knowledgeable; and that cognitive shortcuts cannot fully compensate for meager political knowledge. I introduce a psychological theory of how individuals react to campaign advertising in light of: (1) their political knowledge and (2) their natural impulse to give greater weight to negative information (i.e., negativity bias). Using data from an original laboratory experiment conducted in Mexico City in 2012 and from the 2006 Mexico Panel Study, I examine the effect of campaign advertising on the attribution of candidates' character traits, the evaluation of candidates' policy proposals, and vote intentions. I show that campaign advertising's effects on the attribution of candidates' character traits and the evaluation of their policy proposals are conditioned by the voter's degree of political knowledge and the ad's tone (negative or positive). I also show that campaign advertising has a significant, indirect effect on vote intentions through its effect on the attribution of candidates' character traits and the evaluation of their policy proposals. Finally, I explain why negative advertising has systematically bigger effects on voting behavior than equivalent positive advertising. I look at the case of Mexico to shed light on the effects of campaign advertising in developing democracies. Since most academic research has looked at the United States, this thesis intends to deepen our understanding of campaign advertising in comparative perspective, looking at a country where the thinness of party identification, the ambiguity of issue ownership, and the novelty of the party system renders voters more susceptible to information in campaign advertising. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-03T12:30:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Silvia Olga Knopfler 1-94.pdf: 2092632 bytes, checksum: 628c85553c40c4b840d2f9f7e55c7849 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-05-16 / Transmit an image of social responsible has each day more importance for companies. It is because a strong trademark is formed by much more than simple physical characters of the product or service, but by subjective values. This view shows the institutional advertising as a tendency, once it is an instrument which has the capacity to pass some intangible and subjective ideas. The objective of this study is verify if universities consider the social responsible of the companies important to form the trademark image of some products/services. The conceptual way that we use in this work was the functionalist school; specifically Lazarsfeld and Lasswell who looks for verify the effect of the communications with the public. For this, we did a quantity study with the technique of experience, it is, we move one variable to observe the effect caused. The experimental group received advertising with the argue that we are looking for while the control group received advertising from the same companies but with any other kind of argue. Comparing the groups we verify how the argue social responsibility impact the image of the company.(AU) / Passar a imagem de socialmente responsável tem cada vez mais importância para as empresas. Isso porque uma marca forte é formada por muito mais do que simples atributos físicos de um produto ou serviço, mas por valores subjetivos. Esse cenário aponta a propaganda institucional como uma tendência, já que se trata de um instrumento capaz de passar conceitos intangíveis e subjetivos. O objetivo deste trabalho é verificar se o universitário considera a responsabilidade social empresarial um atributo importante para a formação de imagem de marca de certos produtos/serviços. O percurso teórico utilizado foi o da escola funcionalista, ênfase para Lazarsfeld e Lasswell, que buscavam verificar o alcance da comunicação junto ao público. Para tanto, desenvolvemos uma pesquisa quantitativa com a técnica do experimento, ou seja, manipulamos uma variável para observarmos o efeito produzido. O Grupo Experimental recebeu anúncios com o argumento que queríamos observar enquanto o Grupo de Controle recebeu anúncios das mesmas empresas com outro argumento qualquer. Na comparação entre grupos, verificamos de que forma o apelo responsabilidade social empresarial melhora a imagem da empresa anunciante.(AU)

The thesis is focused on creating an advertising campaign for a figure skating club Plzeň. The work is divided into two parts - theoretical part and a practical part. The theoretical part of the thesis defines the basic terms and defines the building of advertising campaigns. The practical part on the knowledge gained from the theoretical part describes in detail the process of planning an advertising campaign. On this basis, the campaign is implemented and the results are then evaluated. The last part of the thesis gives suggestions for improvement campaign in the future.

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Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 47-53).

The purpose of this research was to determine the aural and visual issues present in televised political campaign advertising of the 1972 Presidential election year. Content analysis was the method employed to determine these issues. The campaign commercials of George McGovern and Richard Nixon were the subject of the analysis. The issues coded were Social Welfare, Natural Resources, Labor, Management, Civil Rights, Economy, Foreign Affairs, Vietnam, Government, Public Order, Defense, Republicans, and Democrats. The results show that the campaigns used issues appearing in network news coverage, the percentage of time each campaign spent on the issues, and that the aural content was supported by the visual images in the commercials.