ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of persuasion studies and the major theories and challenges informing research on media effects. There are a number of studies on the content that different demographic groups prefer in political advertising—valuable information for campaigns to have. Campaigns spend a fair amount of time and effort on deciding the content and tone of their advertising. While advances in microtargeting allow campaigns to more precisely reach a target population, potentially increasing the persuasive influence of ads shown to that population, the growth in sheer volume of advertising may weaken the effectiveness of any individual ad or advertising advantage. Given all of the attention campaigns pay to advertising, it seems reasonable to assume that it does indeed persuade and help candidates get elected. Scholars of political advertising use a variety of strategies to assess the influence of ads, and outline three of them—the observational approach, experiments, and field experiments—along with examples of each type.
