Most Americans think political conventions play a vital role in presidential campaigns, according to a poll released last week by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG).

The poll, conducted last month during the week of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Boston, found that 63 percent of respondents saw party conventions as “still important because they give Americans an in-depth opportunity to know the candidates better.” Thirty-seven percent thought otherwise, believing that primary elections already determined presidential nominees “months in advance.”

The poll surveyed about 1,300 adults and had a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percent.

Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press Thomas E. Patterson said the results could be attributed to the concentrated coverage that the convention provides in a short period of time.

“[Americans] live in a campaign that is 18 months long, and no sane person would pay close attention to the campaign for a year and a half,” Patterson said. “That may make sense for pundits and for people like me. There’s always those campaign junkies out there—they’re like Red Sox fans. For most citizens, we overtax them. Our campaigns just last too long.”

Instead, key moments in the campaign tend to attract the general public’s interest, Patterson said, listing January’s Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries—and the summer conventions.

“I think Americans understand it’s a different look at the candidates, it’s a deeper look at the candidates and in that sense, it’s a special opportunity,” he said of conventions.

Harvard College Democrats President Andrew J. Frank ’05 singled out other reasons for the poll results, pointing to the convention as an opportunity for a “positive portrayal of politics.”

“I think it’s the only time during a campaign where each side is able to frame themselves in their own way without being compared or attacked,” he said. “It’s a time for the country to get to really know the presidential nominee and to get to know the party on its own terms.”

But Jonathan S. Chavez ’05, chair of the Institute of Politics (IOP) student survey committee, also pointed to expectations as a factor that could have played into the poll results.

“Part of this response could be the fact that it is the response people feel they are supposed to give,” he wrote in an e-mail. “People don’t like admitting they don’t care about politics. There is a stigma attached to being apathetic.”

The survey also indicated that party conventions contributed to election interest. Forty-six percent of those polled said that they had discussed the campaign in the past 24 hours, a figure that had risen substantially from the 28 percent of respondents in the mid-July poll.

These results, Patterson said, were not surprising, considering that the poll took place at the time of convention.

Of those who caught a televised segment of the DNC, 23 percent claimed to have not learned “not much at all” about nominee Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., compared to 40 percent who said that they had learned a “great deal” or “quite a bit” about him.

Regardless, Kerry did not experience a significant increase in poll standings following the convention. According to a post-convention CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted between July 30 and August 1, 57 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the Massachusetts senator, a 2 percent spike from his standings prior to the convention.