The Iowa Caucuses and the Presidential Nominating Process by Peverill Squire

Author:Peverill Squire [Squire, Peverill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000302639
Google: RAaiDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 49786476
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

For each type of story (with one exception), we asked our coders to judge on a five point scale "the overall impression of the candidate conveyed by the discussion in this part of the story." This was probably the most difficult judgment our coders had to make (although some felt that determining the basis was even harder), but it is very important for much of the following analysis. When making these judgments, we asked our coders to think like an average newspaper reader. Through repeated discussion sessions, we felt that we reached some consensus on how to do this. The one exception occurred when the story was about one candidate commenting about another. In that case, we asked the coders to tell us what the candidate's evaluation was of the subject of his comments.

Iowa and New Hampshire as News. Did our UPI journalists place more emphasis upon Iowa and New Hampshire than other states because they came first in the nomination process? To answer this question, we constructed two different measures of reporting about primaries and caucuses. One measure called "place" simply took the UPI dateline attached to each story and classified it as one of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, or some foreign locale. Another measure called "location" was coded by reading each story part and determining whether it referred to a state in connection with the campaign. The following analyses are based upon the "place" measure, but almost identical results were obtained with the "location" measure.

Casual observation suggests that most of the coverage of primary and caucus events is concentrated near the events themselves. We would expect to find much more coverage of an event three days before or after it occurs than thirty days before or after. To check this hypothesis, we took each story-part with a state as a dateline and classified it according to the number of days ("event-days") it appeared before or after the primary or caucus event in that state. Then we summed the number of lines of coverage of a particular type of event, say primaries, that appeared on each event day. For example, for all primary states, we summed up the number of lines of coverage that occurred in each of them on the fortieth (thirty-ninth, . . ., third, etc.) day before the primary in each state. Figure 4.1a plots a smoothed version of the number of lines of coverage by the number of days before and after each primary, and Figure 4.1b plots the same smoothed measure by days before and after the caucuses.3 These plots have the same horizontal scale of "event-days," but different vertical scales so that Figure 4.1a for primaries has three times as many lines per division as Figure 4.1b for caucuses. The daily average values are indicated by the integer "1" except when more than one value occurs at the same location in which case the integer represents the number of superimposed values.

There are two significant findings from this analysis. First of all, the shape of coverage is similar for both primaries and caucuses.

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