Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Here’S Looking At You: Public- Versus Elite-Driven Models Of Presidential Primary Elections, Colin D. Swearingen, Elizabeth A. Stiles, Kate Finneran*

2019 Faculty Bibliography

Objective. This study advances the presidential primary literature in two ways. First, since many studies in this literature advocate for more detailed theoretical development, we incorporate an interdisciplinary approach by utilizing social contagion theory from the field of sociology. Second, presidential primaries do not adequately explore what role the public plays during the invisible primary. We thus incorporate Google Trends data into presidential primary models to account for the relative amount of public attention for each presidential primary candidate. Methods. We use fixed effects regression to determine the impact of public attention on a candidate’s share of the contested primary …