"Adrenalized fear": Crisis-management in United States House and Senate campaigns

For more than 25 years, political scientists have studied how scandals affect congressional elections. This literature focuses on the external side of campaigns, which is valuable for exploring outcomes: loss in votes, fundraising and emergence of quality challengers resulting from candidates' ethical transgressions. However, existing work ignores broader campaign crises and the internal side of crisis-management in congressional campaigns. This project bridges the gap between theory and practice by allowing experienced political professionals to share their world through in-depth interviews and case studies. The findings reveal that political consultants, party officials and experienced campaign managers view campaign crises as complex, interactive events, many of which have nothing to do with scandal. Political professionals also report that crises affect campaigns in ways missed by the existing work on scandal. In addition to drawing a distinction between crises and scandals, the project makes significant contributions to the literature on political consulting, campaign organizations and congressional elections. The project also provides a first-hand account of how political professionals make strategic campaign decisions. The project employs a mixed methodology, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. Original, in-depth interviews with more than 100 experienced political professionals are the heart of the data. Grounded theory and "thick description" are essential in giving political professionals leeway to think and talk at length about how they view crises and their impact on campaigns. The first half of the project focuses on building theory about campaign crises, especially how political professionals define campaign crises and how they believe crises affect campaign organizations and strategy and tactics. The first half of the project also develops a typology, which provides an analytical tool for considering crises as internal, external, expected and/or unexpected events. In the second half of the project, case studies of crisis-management in four U.S. Senate races test the theory developed in the first half of the project. Case studies include the 2002 races in Georgia, Minnesota and New Jersey, and the 2000 contest in Washington State.