For a while now, political scientists have been trying to convince journalists that campaigns don't matter much or they matter in subtle ways, but journalists don't seem to get it, so political scientists continue trying to persuade. Judging by longevity of the dispute, journalists find this notion that campaigns don't matter much hard to swallow. I find it hard to swallow as well.

I think the confusion stems at least partly from differences in political scientists' and journalists' training. Political scientists are trained to think about "effects" in a very precise and non-obvious manner. Unfortunately, this thinking is often implicit and political scientists fail to communicate their reasoning to journalists. This leads to a good deal of discussion that seems to accomplish nothing. For example, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, just to take a few examples.

I think that journalists' intuition that campaigns have large effects is correct. I also think that political scientists' research suggesting that campaigns have small effects is correct. How can campaigns have both small and large effects? I think that journalists and political scientists are using different counterfactuals to define "effect."

I think that confusion about the counterfactual leads to much of
the disagreement and confusion about the size of campaign effects. » Continue your journey »