ABSTRACT
Political advertising is an oft-derided feature of modern election campaigns. Ads often contain factual distortions, personal attacks, and appeals to anxiety, anger, and prejudice. Many commentators have suggested that these features of ads cause citizens to become frustrated with the political system and the benefits it has to offer, leading them to disengage. That said, campaign ads may play an important role in educating and involving the widest possible audience during elections. Moreover, ads that are actually critical rather than merely self-promotional may turn out to be both the most informative and memorable (Geer 2006). Thus, these features may systematically distort or enhance democratic outcomes, and our understanding of their effects has implications for ongoing political controversies regarding electoral regulations, campaign finance, and broadcast media ownership. Observers and scholars alike have shown a special interest in the impact of negative (critical), as opposed to positive (self-promotional), advertising. This interest was greatly stimulated by a provocative report, appearing in the mid1990s, about a multitude of scientific experiments that uncovered large demobilizing effects (reducing turnout by as much as 5 percent) for negative ads in comparison to positive ads (Ansolabehere et al. 1994). Subsequent studies, using a variety of research designs and definitions of what makes an ad “negative” (i.e., “negativity”), claimed to find similar effects, opposite effects, or no effects at all. A recent review of scholarship on the topic (Lau et al. 2007) surmised that the studies collectively signal no clear finding about the relationship between negativity and voter turnout. Even if this were the end of the story about negativity-and there are reasons to believe it is not-a variety of other factors may shape the impact of campaign ads on their audience. Ads are not merely negative or positive; they also appeal to a variety of emotions, evoke associations to various groups in society, and differ in the extent and nature of their issue content, to name just a few salient attributes. Potential effects also go beyond mobilizing or demobilizing turnout to include influencing what voters learn, and how they form opinions. Finally, though this has received too little attention from scholars to date, people do not respond uniformly to ads, but rather differ in predictable
ways based on the psychological-cognitive and emotional-processes set in motion by both their personal characteristics and their situation. In this chapter, we first review recent scholarship illustrative of promising directions in the study of campaign advertising. With this foundation, we also consider specific proposals for improving the measurement, modeling, and conceptualization of advertising effects that could improve future work. We put some of these recommendations into practice by briefly replicating recent research carried out by ourselves or others.
