<p>The aim of this study is to explore the implementation of viral marketing in Politics. We led a case study in order to discover how viral techniques were used to promote candidates running for the 2007 French election. The review of previous research provided learning about the use of new communication methods in electoral campaigns.Nevertheless, they are not specifically devoted to the viral marketing method. At present, theoretical models about this new phenomenon exist only for business sectors. Viral marketing is becoming of greater importance in the promotion of a candidate's brand image. It was interesting to discover how marketing techniques are transferred into the field of politics. Through our theoretical framework we analysed results from our interview with a webmaster who works for the Nicolas Sarkozy's political party. We explained the role of viral marketing in the communication strategy of politicians. Thanks to the focus group, we assessed the impact of viral marketing among French voters. The results show that it generates a word-of-mouth campaign about the candidate's personality which results in a political "Buzz". This high media coverage heavily influences the voters who are highly sensitive to image branding. However, the counterpart of using viral marketing is the lack of control that candidates maintain over their image. For example, the spreading of undesirable videos could harm their credibility. Finally, our study shows that modern politics is appealing for viral marketing in order to shape the political leader's image, which constitutes a determinant factor to influence voters.</p>

In 1992, Ross Perot, billionaire entrepreneur from Texas, headed the most powerful independent presidential candidacy of the twentieth century, garnering nearly 19 percent of the popular vote. Perot's rhetoric demanded fundamental reform through a seemingly contradictory message calling for both individual responsibility and collective patriotism and sacrifice: corporate populism, a traditional, albeit profoundly paradoxical ideological appeal. Perot spoke of rekindling the "American Dream" for the next generation, whose prospects appeared bleak because of a post-Cold War credit crisis and withering of the United States' industrial base. He saw linkages between this crisis and a host of social problems, and advocated controversial solutions that made coalition-building difficult. Perot looked to his followers to develop consensuses on many issues of the day. Heading a "grassroots" movement organized from the top down, with disciples from all points on the ideological compass, however, Perot found consensus a rare commodity. As a result, his campaign lacked cohesion. Perot's methods, personality, and wealth raised disturbing questions about the future of representative democracy, but his unfolding campaign also highlighted shortcomings in American electoral institutions and processes. Perot's treatment by the press, for example, provides a case study of the mass-production of political portraits and the impact of those images. That so many citizens voted for a man often portrayed as a suspicious, morally rigid, unscrupulous, vengeful demagogue indicates how widely disaffection with American political institutions had spread. Tapping this discontent, Perot created the potential for a new kind of politics in the United States. He catalyzed discourse on policy issues like foreign trade, welfare reform, military policy, and Executive branch responsibility. He focused attention on chronic problems like the national debt, the annual budget deficit, and the insolvency of "entitlement" programs like Social Security and Medicare. His presence seems to have provoked an unusually high turnout on election day. He helped pioneer a new era of direct dialog between candidates and citizens through the use of interactive and electronic media. Finally, Perot's candidacy symbolizes the emergence of a new centrist political movement--a force which in 1994 began to dramatically reshape the American political landscape.

This two part analysis looks at forecasting models in the United States' 2016 presidential election and breaks down the elections fundamental and contingency factors. This paper argues that political science forecasting models could be improved through a more localized approach and by utilizing additional contingency factors. The psychology study of this analysis explores the already established relationship between political conservatism and favorability ratings, as well as the relationship between perceived similarity between voter personality and candidate personality, referred to as personality mirroring, and favorability ratings. The study uses past research to suggest that these relationships for the 2016 presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, can be explained through mediating variables: leader effectiveness and trust. The study used participants recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for data, all adults who voted in the 2016 US presidential election. The study found that there was a full mediation of leadership effectiveness for Donald Trump and significant partial mediation for the other three explored relationships.

A number of presidents have aided the auto industry, protected it from external threats, or saved it from collapse, while presidential rhetoric about the industry is positive and consistent across political parties and over time. I conduct rhetorical analyses of the entire history of presidential speech about the industry to explain the evolution of the relationship between these two institutions. I argue that this relationship is an example of the institutionalization of speech; perfunctory campaign praise became habitual and eventually coalesced into a rhetorical legacy that entailed rhetorical and material resources and constraints for the institution of the presidency. In the case of the auto industry, presidents sought political support from the auto industry as a constituency, erased blameworthy aspects of industry history, and created an industry identity that was exceptional, which served as justification for defense of the industry and intervention during periods of economic recession, regulatory stress, foreign competition, and imminent collapse of an automaker. Such cases of institutionalized speech between the presidency and other institutions are special, but not unique; this case provides an instructive example of how speech becomes legacy over time, and of what the consequences of such legacies might include for this case and for possible others.

The thesis "Analysis of the Czech Periodicals' News Coverage of the 2013 Presidential Elections in the Czech Republic" examines how the daily newspapers Mladá fronta DNES, Lidové noviny and Hospodářské noviny framed the election campaign. It also focuses on the degree of compliance with the criteria of impartiality in media contents. Texts with the endorsements are also a part of the analysis. The teoretical part draws the typical features of the relationship between the media and politics and the main theoretical and methodological basis for research of the frames and objectivity. It also introduces the concept of media framing as "fragmented paradigm" and objectivity as an unattainable ideal. Foreign researches and a study of Český rozhlas are an integral part of the theoretical section. Their conclusions were used in the analysis itself. The aim of the research carried out by means of a combined quantitative and qualitative content analysis was to determine how Czech daily newspapers responded in their content to direct presidential elections associated with the phenomenon of endorsement. Quantitative analysis focuses on the dominant frames and key issues associated with elections occurring in media contents. Further, it focuses on the extent to which journals presented candidates in the neutral...

That Barack Obama's race was a factor, for both blacks and whites, in the 2008 general election is well-documented. As the majority in this country, the white electorate's response to the nation's first successful African-American presidential contender is of particular interest because it revealed the persistent effects of racism. Scholars have suggested contemporary forms of racism (e.g., Ditonto et al., 2013) explained the reluctance of white citizens to cast their ballots for an African American. This dissertation approaches the topic from a different angle, arguing deep-seated beliefs about which individual characteristics define a legitimate president, race in this project, affected voting decisions, especially among whites. Such beliefs, or "status expectations" (Ridgeway&Berger, 1986), are evident every day in social interactions and are also reflected in the mass media, especially in the vivid medium of television, which was proposed to reinforce status beliefs about presidential legitimacy among white viewers. African Americans, in contrast, were hypothesized be inured to status beliefs represented in television campaign coverage because of a protective, ingroup orientation called "linked fate," (Dawson, 2004), the belief that life chances of the individual are inextricably intertwined with life chances of the black race as a whole. Therefore, while mass media would affect whites' assessments of presidential legitimacy, linked fate would lead African Americans to reject the status beliefs about presidential legitimacy embedded in televised content because this medium has historically derogated their "ingroup". Findings, however, did not support this proposed insulating effect of linked fate, which was operationalized as perceived black racial group favoritism. In fact, moderating relationships, even when statistically significant, typically added little explanatory value to or confounded interpretation of the presidential legitimacy models. Thus, baseline models with main effects were the clearest and most statistically powerful in discerning which variables had the greatest impact on Obama and McCain presidential legitimacy assessments. For both candidates, party identification and race were consistently the most influential predictors. But, for McCain, the effect of conservative partisanship was particularly acute, with an effect size more than three times the effect size of race and four times the size of the most powerful media effect, Fox News believability. In contrast, multiple predictors of comparable effect size factored into Obama legitimacy assessments. Measured by both number of statistically significant media variables and magnitude of effect sizes, Obama's legitimacy assessments were more affected by media predictors than were McCain's. For Obama presidential legitimacy, the most influential variables were Democratic partisan identification, black race, Fox News believability (negatively related), and perceived black racial group favoritism. The next most influential predictors were CNN believability, MSNBC believability, and a status expectation measure of Obama's legitimacy. A third grouping of influential predictors consisted of broadcast believability, an education control variable, and a status expectation measure of McCain's legitimacy (negatively related). These predictors yielded a model that explained 43% of the variance in Obama legitimacy assessments, in contrast to the 28% of variance explained by the model without media variables. Though McCain's presidential legitimacy evaluations were driven primarily by Republican partisan identification and, to a lesser extent, race, several media variables attained statistical significance in the McCain model: the number of days respondents watched television for campaign news, CNN believability, and Fox News believability, all of which augmented McCain's legitimacy assessments. The proportion of variance in McCain legitimacy assessments explained by the model with media effects was 20%, compared to 16% in the model without media predictors, figures substantially lower than the 43% and 28% in the respective Obama models. The range of predictors in the Obama legitimacy model implied myriad perspectives notably absent in the McCain legitimacy model, a pattern that mirrored the diverse coalition that ultimately supported him. Therefore, despite only partial support for this dissertation's hypotheses, the results were consistent with the current partisan and racial divisions in this country, divisions that were affected by the media in the 2008 election.

Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel / This thesis proposes two semiparametric estimators; one for heavily censored panel models and another one for binary-outcome sample selection models. The first chapter proposes a new panel data estimator, and applies it to investigate whether the key assumption underlying most twin studies is valid. Roughly, the assumption is that differences in twins' outcomes can on average be attributed to differences in observed treatments, possibly after conditioning on observable covariates. The empirical results here cast doubt on this assumption, by showing that a particular outcome, survival, varies by birth order, even after conditioning on health-at-birth characteristics. The proposed panel data estimator is the first one in the literature that simultaneously handles having an unknown error distribution, fixed effects, fixed T, fixed censoring point, and heavy (greater than 50%) censoring. These features are all required to adequately deal with the limitations of available census data on twins. The proposed estimator also allows for coefficients that vary by t, and for a censoring point that is an unknown but deterministic function of regressors. The second chapter proposes a new semiparametric estimator for binary-outcome selection models that does not impose any distributional assumption, nor specify the selection equation. The estimator, however, requires a special regressor satisfying a support restriction in the outcome equation and a variable satisfying the exclusion/inclusion restriction; the former should be continuous whereas the latter can be discrete. The estimators of Klein et al. (2011) and Escanciano et al. (2012) require optimization, but our estimator for the outcome equation has a closed-form expression with no need for any optimization (but the selection equation estimation may still need an optimization). We apply MLE and the proposed estimator to US presidential election data in 2008 and 2012 where Barack Obama won to see to what extent racism mattered; we use a prejudice variable as a measure of racism. Putting our empirical findings in advance, there is evidence that the white Democrats voted less for Obama due to prejudice, whereas the white Republicans acted in a more muted fashion (i.e., almost no change in voting due to racism) or voted more for Obama to escape the stigma of racism. We also found evidence of "own-race favor" by blacks. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Thesis advisor: Robert Capalbo / The Presidential Scholars Program is a full tuition scholarship program offer to the 15 most outstanding applicants to Boston College each year. It involves three summer programs: a summer of service, an international summer experience, and a career development internship. The Program is funded by the Wall Street Council's Tribut Dinner to Boston College. During the first decade and a half of its existence, the Program has successfully fulfilled its mission to increase the intellectual standing of the University. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

[pt] O objetivo deste trabalho é acompanhar as etapas da campanha de Getúlio Vargas às eleições presidenciais de 1950. Tendo chegado à presidência duas vezes através de golpes de Estado e uma vez por voto indireto, Vargas voltaria ao poder através do voto popular, graças a uma campanha inteligente e moderna. Em menos de dois meses, sua comitiva visitou todas as capitais do país, o Distrito Federal, e mais de 50 cidades, estabelecendo uma comunicação direta entre candidato e eleitores. Em cerca de 80 discursos, Vargas apresentou um projeto político nacional, entremeado por assuntos de interesse local, valorizando a participação de cada Estado no crescimento da Federação como um todo. O sucesso no pleito presidencial de 1950 foi em parte conseqüência de um cuidadoso trabalho de construção de sua imagem, realizado por Vargas desde seu primeiro mandato. Apesar de alguns autores concordarem que o marketing político surgiu no Brasil em 1954, na campanha de 1950 Vargas utilizou procedimentos sistemáticos de comunicação e propaganda eleitoral. Ações direcionadas a um público-alvo e uso inteligente dos meios de comunicação são técnicas da estratégia varguista e também do que hoje chamamos de marketing político. / [en] This research is about Getulio Vargas´ presidential elections campaign, in 1950. Vargas, who had reached presidency twice through coups and once through indirect elections, became once again president in 1950, due to an intelligent and modern campaign. During a couple of months, his entourage visited more than 50 cities and the Federal District, establishing a channel for direct communication between the candidate and the electors. In a series of speeches, Vargas presented his national political project, merged with local affairs, detaching the participation of each unit in the growth of the whole federation. The success in the presidential elections of 1950 was a consequence of a careful work of image construction, since Vargas´ first mandate. Some authors argue that political marketing was not used in Brazil until 1954, but the claim of this work is that Vargas made use of systematic procedures of electoral propaganda and communication as early as his 1950´s campaign. Focusedtarget actions and intelligent use of midia were part of Vargas´ campaign and are also part of what we today know as political marketing.

Esta dissertação trata do estudo da volatilidade eleitoral nas eleições presidenciais brasileiras no período de 1989 a 2006 na escala dos municípios brasileiros. Foi calculada a volatilidade eleitoral em quatro períodos: 1989/1994, 1994/1998, 1998/2002 e 2002/2006. Os cálculos foram feitos por meio do índice de volatilidade entre blocos de partidos (Bartolini e Mair 1990). A geografia eleitoral da volatilidade eleitoral municipal desses períodos é apresentada através de tabelas e mapas. Os municípios brasileiros são Identificados e classificados em cinco grupos pelo número de vezes em que eles apresentaram taxas altas de volatilidade no período de 1989 a 2006. Por fim é analisada a possível correlação entre essa classificação e algumas variáveis socioeconômicas. Os resultados obtidos sugerem que altas taxas de volatilidade eleitoral durante as eleições presidenciais nos municípios brasileiros estiveram correlacionadas a índices baixos de condição de vida e educacionais. / This dissertation is on the electoral volatility in Brazilian presidential elections between 1989 and 2006 on Brazilian municipalities scale. The electoral volatility of four periods was calculated: 1989/1994, 1994/1998, 1998/2002, and 2002/2006. The calculations were made using the inter-bloc volatility index (Bartolini and Mair, 1990). The electoral geography of municipal electoral volatility is presented through maps and tables. The Brazilian municipalities were identified and classified into five groups according to the incidence of high volatility in the period 1989 to 2006. Finally, there is an analysis of the possible correlation between this classification and some socioeconomic variables. The results indicate that high rates of electoral volatility during presidential elections in Brazilian municipalities were correlated with low rates of education and life condition.