Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Political Advertising

Item

Title

Political Advertising

Author

Fowler, Erika Franklin

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Government Systems

Abstract

Political advertising provides a key link between the politician and the public. The concern over massive manipulation through political propaganda that drove early empirical research on the subject has subsided; however, newer research concludes that advertising can have nontrivial but short‐lived influence on voter preferences. Furthermore, increasing levels of negativity and concerns over the consequences of such negativity spawned a heated debate in the literature over whether negative ads stimulate or depress turnout at the polls with the most recent evidence suggesting that it is the timing of negativity that determines its effect. Although advertising is intended to persuade, research suggests the medium yields important informational benefits, especially for citizens who do not pay a lot of attention to politics, and there is little to suggest that negativity has large negative effects on the health of democracy. Although the 2012 election was a record‐shattering year for political advertising, campaigns are shifting to multi‐platform communication strategies, which will bring new challenges for researchers.

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Identifier

etrds0252

extracted text

Political Advertising
ERIKA FRANKLIN FOWLER

Abstract
Political advertising provides a key link between the politician and the public. The
concern over massive manipulation through political propaganda that drove early
empirical research on the subject has subsided; however, newer research concludes
that advertising can have nontrivial but short-lived influence on voter preferences.
Furthermore, increasing levels of negativity and concerns over the consequences of
such negativity spawned a heated debate in the literature over whether negative ads
stimulate or depress turnout at the polls with the most recent evidence suggesting
that it is the timing of negativity that determines its effect. Although advertising is
intended to persuade, research suggests the medium yields important informational
benefits, especially for citizens who do not pay a lot of attention to politics, and there
is little to suggest that negativity has large negative effects on the health of democracy. Although the 2012 election was a record-shattering year for political advertising,
campaigns are shifting to multi-platform communication strategies, which will bring
new challenges for researchers.

INTRODUCTION
Despite a myriad of changes over the last half century in the way in which
modern political campaigns are run, there remains one big constant: the
important role of political advertising as a central feature of the way in
which candidates communicate with citizens. Although campaigns are
increasingly utilizing the Internet as a central component of campaign
strategy, the use of television advertising has not declined (Ridout & Franz,
2011). Quite to the contrary, 2012 was—in fact—a record pulverizing year
for TV ad volume and spending (Fowler & Ridout, 2012). Whether the 2012
election represents the high water mark or not, there can be no doubt that
campaign advertising provides a key link between candidates for office
and the public they seek to represent, one that comprises the largest single
expenditure of modern campaigns (West, 2010).
Given the centrality of political advertising to campaigns and elections, it
should come as no surprise that the subject has garnered lavish attention
from political scientists examining advertising’s influence on citizen voting
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

preferences, turnout at the polls, knowledge and views of the political system
more broadly. The field has amassed a very large body of knowledge about
advertising effects, and yet in some ways, there are some important questions
that largely remain unanswered. This essay will attempt to outline the field
of research on advertising and discuss the current trajectory of cutting-edge
developments in the field before turning to critical issues for future research.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Studies of political advertising have focused on a number of questions
regarding its influence. In order to fully understand the effect of campaign
ads, it is important to acknowledge its multifaceted role, not just as a tool
of political persuasion, but also as a vehicle for potential mobilization
or suppression and provision of candidate information. As negativity is a
prominent and increasing feature of campaign advertising (Fowler & Ridout,
2011, 2012; Geer, 2006), many questions revolve specifically around the role
negative attacks play in advertising influence. Therefore, where appropriate,
the evidence regarding negativity will be discussed in conjunction with
advertising’s effect on persuasion, mobilization, citizen information, and
attitudes about government and democracy.
DO ADS PERSUADE?
The first and seemingly most straightforward question given the intended
goal of the medium is the extent to which political advertising actually
changes minds. Early empirical work on the influence of media largely
dismissed concerns over massive influence, concluding that advertising
had little to no effect as a tool of persuasion (Campbell, Converse, Miller, &
Stokes, 1960; Klapper, 1960; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). This
initial work ushered in an era of the so-called minimal effects, in which
scholars largely confirmed that media messages had minimal ability to
persuade. More recent work, however, recognized at least two problems
in the foundational conclusions. First, when messages compete, as is the
case in many electoral races, especially those for president, the two-sided
(competing) flows of information will likely cancel out any potential persuasive influence, which does not mean that the messages have no effect but
rather that we need to know when and where to look for effects (McGuire,
1986; Zaller, 1996). Second, we should not necessarily expect advertising to
influence all citizens or all candidates equally; strength of existing opinions
(or predispositions) matters (Bartels, 1993; Zaller, 1992).
To the extent that advertising has an influence, the influence is most likely
to be a marginal one, which is not to say that they do not matter. More than

Political Advertising

3

a few competitive elections are fought at the margin, where advertising may
matter a great deal. Indeed, newer scholarship has found that advertising
advantages—when one candidate has more ads on the air compared to his
or her opponent—do correspond with a decline in favorability for the targeted candidate (Kahn & Kenney, 2004) with larger benefits to challengers
than incumbents (Lau & Pomper, 2004; Ridout & Franz, 2011), in part due to
the asymmetrical amount of information citizens have about the candidates.
Popular wisdom suggests that negativity “works,” but academic evidence
that negative ads are more persuasive than positive ones is more tenuous.
Some argue that emotional appeals to anger or fear may matter more than
negativity (Brader, 2006), although a recent observational analysis had trouble finding consistent effects of emotional appeals (Ridout & Franz, 2011).
Research suggests that sponsors of negativity do experience some backlash,
or decline in support, due to negative attacks (Kahn & Geer, 1994; Lemert,
Wanta, & Lee, 2006); however, a recent meta-analysis of the field argued that
research examining the “net” persuasive effect of attacks (the decline in support for the targeted candidate minus the decline or backlash in support for
the favored candidate) is few and far between and that additional evidence
is needed to confirm overall effect (Lau, Sigelman, & Rovner, 2007).
The rise of interest group advertising in response to recent changes in the
campaign finance landscape (Franz, 2012) has raised interesting questions
and concerns over influence. These concerns are tied to negativity as interest
groups are more likely to air negative attacks than candidate-sponsored
airings (Fowler & Ridout, 2012; Franz, Freedman, Goldstein, & Ridout,
2008a). Candidates themselves do not shy away from negativity, but some
research suggests that interest group attacks may be more persuasive than
candidate-sponsored ones (Groenendyk & Valentino, 2002). Others argue
that the difference is not in persuasive power but rather that candidates
are less likely to suffer backlash from attacks aired by interest groups on
their behalf than if they air those same attacks themselves (Brooks & Murov,
2012). Additional work argues that the influence of interest group ads may
be moderated by the amount of information citizens have about the group
(Weber, Dunaway, & Johnson, 2012) or the disclosure of its financial donors
(Dowling & Wichowsky, 2013).
DO ADS AFFECT TURNOUT AT THE POLLS?
A heated scholarly debate regarding the influence of advertising on voter
turnout started with experimental analyses and some real-world replications
arguing that negativity had a large demobilizing effect on the American
electorate (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995; Ansolabehere, Iyengar, & Simon,
1999). Numerous researchers challenged the initial findings, arguing that

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

rather than demobilizing, negativity could actually mobilize citizens by
conveying the importance of what was at stake (Brader, 2006; Djupe &
Peterson, 2002; Freedman, Franz, & Goldstein, 2004; Freedman & Goldstein,
1999; Hillygus, 2005; Martin, 2004). Still others found no influence of advertising on turnout (Clinton & Lapinski, 2004; Finkel & Geer, 1998; Krasno &
Green, 2008). Assessing the large literature on the subject, Franz, Freedman,
Goldstein, and Ridout argue, “there is very little evidence that advertising,
whatever its other effects, has any negative effect on voter participation
in America” (2008b, p. 267). Lau et al. in summarizing their meta-analytic
assessment of the state of the field agree, stating that, “if anything negative
campaigning more frequently appears to have a slight mobilization effect”
(2007, p. 1184).
ADVERTISING’S RELATIONSHIP TO KNOWLEDGE AND INTEREST
Scholarship is more consistent regarding the influence of advertising and
negativity on citizen knowledge, recall and interest in the campaign.
Although advertising is intended to persuade, it often increases information
in the process. Studies of campaign spending argue that money spent
on the campaign correlates with increased citizen knowledge (Coleman &
Manna, 2000), which improves the quality of democracy. Moreover, evidence
suggests not only that advertising may increase voter information but also
that knowledge increases are especially noticeable among political novices
(Freedman et al., 2004; Ridout, Shah, Goldstein, & Franz, 2004). Negativity
may play an important role in increasing knowledge, given negative ads
have been shown to be more memorable than positive ones (Brians &
Wattenberg, 1996; Martin, 2004), contain more substantive information
compared to positive spots (Franz et al., 2008a; Geer, 2006) and stimulate
more interest in campaigns (Bartels, 2000; Brader, 2006; Marcus, Neuman, &
MacKuen, 2000).
ADVERTISING AND DEMOCRATIC HEALTH
We know that negativity corresponds with increased levels of information
and perhaps even a slight mobilization effect at the polls, but what about
the longer term influences of advertising and negativity on attitudes toward
the political system and citizens’ role in it? Though negative perceptions
tend to correspond with lower efficacy (Thorson, Ognianova, Coyle, &
Denton, 2000) and lower levels of trust in government (Lesher & Thorson,
2000), research that examines the influence of advertising itself finds little
evidence that negativity has harmful effects on trust or political efficacy
(Brooks & Geer, 2007; Geer, 2006; Jackson, Mondak, & Huckfeldt, 2009). In
sum, the literature tends to find advertising has positive (or at the very least
non-negative) democratic benefits.

Political Advertising

5

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
New and innovative work involving political advertising continues to
improve knowledge about its role as the central linkage between politician
and the public. Reporting on the results of the first large-scale experiment,
Gerber, Gimpel, Green, and Shaw (2011) employed $2 million of incumbent
Governor Rick Perry’s 2006 reelection funds on advertising in media markets
randomly assigned to different launch dates and volume of activity. By
pairing the experimental deployment of ads with daily tracking surveys and
a follow-up after the campaign’s end, the authors found that advertising
had a strong influence on voter preferences but also that the effects decayed
rapidly. More specifically, the results indicated that advertising was a
relatively inexpensive method of boosting citizen support for a favored
candidate but that the large, immediate increase in preference could no
longer be detected 1 or 2 weeks after the ad campaign’s end. In other words,
advertising’s power to persuade may be large but short-lived.
There is also new research that helps to explain the stalemate in the
literature on the question of mobilization. Scholar Yanna Krupnikov (2011,
2012) argues that the timing of exposure to negativity greatly influences the
extent to which its influence will be one of mobilization or demobilization.
In particular, Krupnikov’s argument and evidence suggest that negativity
before citizens make a choice of candidate can aid candidate selection but
encountering negativity about a chosen candidate after the individual has
made the decision to vote for that candidate may result in uncertainty about
the choice, leading to a demobilization effect. In other words, negativity has
a conditional effect on turnout that has everything to do with the timing of
exposure.
In addition to these key developments, new techniques from computer
science such as textual (and eventually video visual) analysis—where
computer-assisted clustering algorithms allow researchers to “efficiently
search over millions of potential categorizations schemes to identify interesting or useful organizations of the text” (Grimmer & Stewart, 2013)—hold
particular promise for the field of advertising and communication more
broadly. Political scientist Nick Beauchamp (2011), for example, uses a
“bottom-up” approach to ad effectiveness by predicting the influence of any
given ad based on the words of its script alone.

KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
In sum, we know a great deal about the influence of advertising. We know
that advertising can move citizen preferences though its effect is short-lived;
that to the extent that negativity influences turnout, the influence is more

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

likely to be a slight mobilization effect although the timing of exposure to
negative messages matters a great deal; that advertising has positive benefits for citizen knowledge, especially among the low-information public, and
that on balance advertising appears to contribute to democratic health. Key to
the development of advertising analysis in the real world (as opposed to the
laboratory) was the development and availability of comprehensive tracking services like Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), which deploys
“ad detectors” in each of the nation’s 210 media markets to track where and
when political ads air along with recording the actual spot itself. Thanks
to CMAG and the efforts of the Wisconsin Advertising Project (2000–2008)
and its successor, the Wesleyan Media Project (2010–present), the scholarly
community’s access to this frequency and content information has vastly
improved the study of campaign strategy and advertising influence. And
yet, in spite of the vast strides scholars have made on multiple fronts, big
questions remain.
Although advertising is intended to persuade, common sense tells us that
we should not expect all ads to be equally persuasive, and yet the vast majority of (especially observational) research ignores this complicating factor and
simply counts up the number of spots on each side, presuming that the candidate with the largest number of ads in any given market has the advantage.
Is it possible that one particularly powerful ad might trump or counteract
many hundred airings of a not-so-powerful one? And how, specifically,
do the content features of advertising correlate to persuasive influence?
The literature has little systematic or comprehensive guidance on either
subject.
As large as those questions are, there are even larger ones to come.
Although standard practice of micro-targeting messages through direct
mail has been around for a long time, there is evidence that campaigns
are now tailoring their advertising to specific audiences (Ridout, Franz,
Goldstein, & Feltus, 2012). Communication technology will allow campaigns
to increasingly personalize the content of messages while also increasing the
number of possible ways through which campaigns may reach citizens, and
these developments will occur by orders of magnitude. As the tide shifts
and campaigns move rapidly into a multi-platform advertising strategy
where a greater proportion of ads are viewed, discussed and shared online,
tracking that advertising placement let alone measuring its effect will
become increasingly difficult. As campaigns evolve, the tools of scholars,
including big data techniques enabling large quantitative mappings of
message sentiment and networks, will be especially important in keeping
up. Whether and how existing efforts to track campaign activities will be
sufficient remain to be seen.

Political Advertising

7

REFERENCES
Ansolabehere, S., & Iyengar, S. (1995). Going negative: How political advertisements
shrink and polarize the electorate. New York, NY: Free Press.
Ansolabehere, S., Iyengar, S., & Simon, A. (1999). Replicating experiments using
aggregate and survey data: The case of negative advertising and turnout. American
Political Science Review, 93, 901–909.
Bartels, L. M. (1993). Messages received: The political impact of media exposure.
American Political Science Review, 87, 267–285.
Bartels, L. M. (2000). Partisanship and voting behavior, 1952–1996. American Journal
of Political Science, 44, 35–50.
Beauchamp, N. (2011). A bottom-up approach to linguistic persuasion in advertising. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
Brader, T. (2006). Campaigning for hearts and minds: How emotional appeals in political
ads work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Brians, C. L., & Wattenberg, M. P. (1996). Campaign issue knowledge and salience:
Comparing reception from TV commercials, TV news and newspapers. American
Journal of Political Science, 40, 172–193.
Brooks, D. J., & Geer, J. G. (2007). Beyond negativity: The effects of incivility on the
electorate. American Journal of Political Science, 51(January), 1–16.
Brooks, D. J., & Murov, M. (2012). Assessing accountability in a post-citizens united
era: The effects of attack ad sponsorship by unknown independent groups. American Politics Research, 40(3), 383–418.
Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American voter.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Clinton, J., & Lapinski, J. S. (2004). “Targeted” advertising and voter turnout:
An experimental study of the 2000 presidential election. Journal of Politics, 66,
69–96.
Coleman, J. J., & Manna, P. F. (2000). Congressional campaign spending and the quality of democracy. Journal of Politics, 62(3), 757–789.
Dowling, C. M., & Wichowsky, A. (2013). Does it matter who’s behind the curtain?
anonymity in political advertising and the Effects of Campaign Finance Disclosure. American Politics Research, 41(6), 965–996.
Djupe, P. A., & Peterson, D. A. M. (2002). The impact of negative campaigning:
Evidence from the 1998 senatorial primaries. Political Research Quarterly, 55(4),
845–860.
Finkel, S. E., & Geer, J. G. (1998). A spot check: Casting doubt on the demobilizing
effect of attack advertising. American Journal of Political Science, 42, 573–595.
Fowler, E. F., & Ridout, T. N. (2012). Negative, angry and ubiquitous: Political advertising in 2012. The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics,
10(4), 51–61.
Fowler, E. F., & Ridout, T. N. (2011). Advertising trends in 2010. The Forum: A Journal
of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, 8(4).
Franz, M. M. (2012). Interest groups in electoral politics: 2012 in context. The Forum:
A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, 10(4), 62–79.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Franz, M. M., Freedman, P., Goldstein, K., & Ridout, T. N. (2008a). Campaign advertising and American democracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Franz, M. M., Freedman, P., Goldstein, K., & Ridout, T. N. (2008b). Understanding the
effect of political ads on voter turnout: A response to krasno and green. Journal of
Politics, 70(1), 262–268.
Freedman, P., Franz, M. M., & Goldstein, K. (2004). Campaign advertising and democratic citizenship. American Journal of Political Science, 48(4), 723–741.
Freedman, P., & Goldstein, K. M. (1999). Measuring media exposure and the effects
of negative campaign ads. American Journal of Political Science, 43, 1189–1208.
Geer, J. G. (2006). In defense of negativity: Attack ads in presidential campaigns. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gerber, A. S., Gimpel, J. G., Green, D. P., & Shaw, D. R. (2011). How large and
long-lasting are the persuasive effects of televised campaign ads? Results from
a randomized field experiment. American Political Science Review, 105(01), 135–150.
Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297.
Groenendyk, E. W., & Valentino, N. A. (2002). Of dark clouds and silver linings:
Effects of exposure to issue versus candidate advertising on persuasion, information retention, and issue salience. Communication Research, 29, 295–319.
Hillygus, D. S. (2005). Campaign effects and the dynamics of turnout intention in
election 2000. Journal of Politics, 67(1), 50–68.
Jackson, R. A., Mondak, J. J., & Huckfeldt, R. (2009). Examining the possible corrosive impact of negative advertising on citizens’ attitudes toward politics. Political
Research Quarterly, 62(1), 55–69.
Kahn, K. F., & Geer, J. G. (1994). Creating impressions: An experimental investigation
of political advertising on television. Political Behavior, 16(1), 93–116.
Kahn, K. F., & Kenney, P. J. (2004). No holds barred: Negativity in U.S. Senate campaigns.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Klapper, J. T. (1960). The effects of mass communication. New York, NY: Free Press.
Krasno, J. S., & Green, D. P. (2008). Do televised presidential ads increase voter
turnout? Evidence from a natural experiment. Journal of Politics, 70(1), 245–261.
Krupnikov, Y. (2011). When does negativity demobilize? Tracing the conditional
effect of negative campaigning on voter turnout. American Journal of Political Science, 55(4), 797–813. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00522.x
Krupnikov, Y. (2012). Negative advertising and voter choice: The role of ads in
candidate selection. Political Communication, 29(4), 387–413. doi:10.1080/10584609.
2012.721868
Lau, R., & Pomper, G. (2004). Negative campaigning: An analysis of US Senate elections.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lau, R., Sigelman, L., & Rovner, I. B. (2007). The effects of negative political advertisements: A meta-analytic reassessment. Journal of Politics, 69, 1176–1209.
Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). The people’s choice: How the voter
makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.

Political Advertising

9

Lemert, J. B., Wanta, W., & Lee, T. T. (2006). Party identification and negative advertising in a US Senate election. Journal of Communication, 49(2), 123–134.
Lesher, G., & Thorson, E. (2000). Overreporting voting: Campaign media, public
mood, and the vote. Political Communication, 17(July–September), 263–278.
Marcus, G. E., Neuman, W. R., & MacKuen, M. (2000). Affective intelligence and political
judgment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, P. S. (2004). Inside the black box of negative campaign effects: Three reasons
why negative campaigns mobilize. Political Psychology, 25(4), 545–562.
McGuire, W. J. (1986). The myth of massive media impact: Savaging and salvagings.
In G. Comstock (Ed.), Public communication and behavior (Vol. 1, pp. 173–257).
Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Ridout, T. N., & Franz, M. (2011). The persuasive power of campaign advertising. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Ridout, T. N., Franz, M., Goldstein, K. M., & Feltus, W. J. (2012). Separation by television program: Understanding the targeting of political advertising in presidential
elections. Political Communication, 29(1), 1–23.
Ridout, T. N., Shah, D., Goldstein, K., & Franz, M. (2004). Evaluating measures of
campaign advertising exposure on political learning. Political Behavior, 26, 201–225.
Thorson, E., Ognianova, E., Coyle, J., & Denton, F. (2000). Negative political ads and
negative citizen orientations toward politics. Journal of Current Issues and Research
in Advertising, 22, 13–40.
Weber, C., Dunaway, J., & Johnson, T. (2012). Its all in the name: Source cue ambiguity
and the persuasive appeal of campaign ads. Political Behavior, 34(3), 561–584.
West, D. M. (2010). Air wars: Television advertising in election campaigns, 1952–2008.
Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Zaller, J. (1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Zaller, J. (1996). The myth of massive media impact revived: New support for a discredited
idea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

ERIKA FRANKLIN FOWLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Erika Franklin Fowler (PhD, University of Wisconsin—Madison) is assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University where she directs the
Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks and analyzes all political ads aired on
broadcast television in real-time during elections. Fowler specializes in political communication research, focusing on local media and campaign advertising in particular, and her work has been published in political science,
communication, law/policy, and medical journals. Fowler teaches courses in
American politics, media and politics, public opinion, and empirical methods. She has secured roughly a half million dollars in grants supporting the
Wesleyan Media Project’s efforts and her other research, and her work with
the Media Project has been cited extensively in the nation’s leading media
outlets. Fowler graduated summa cum laude with a BA in mathematics and

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

political science from St. Olaf College, and prior to arriving at Wesleyan, she
spent 2 years as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at
the University of Michigan.
RELATED ESSAYS
Domestic Politics of Trade Policy (Political Science), Michaël Aklin et al.
Party Organizations’ Electioneering Arms Race (Political Science), John H.
Aldrich and Jeffrey D. Grynaviski
Economic Models of Voting (Political Science), Ian G. Anson and Timothy
Hellwig
The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science), Sarah
F. Anzia
Political Ideologies (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and Nicholas J.
D’Amico
Government Formation and Cabinets (Political Science), Sona N. Golder
Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless
Civic Engagement (Sociology), Peter Levine
Participatory Governance (Political Science), Stephanie L. McNulty and Brian
Wampler
Money in Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey Milyo
Electoral Authoritarianism (Political Science), Andreas Schedler
Does the 1 Person 1 Vote Principle Apply? (Political Science), Ian R. Turner
et al.
Constitutionalism (Political Science), Keith E. Whittington



Political Advertising
ERIKA FRANKLIN FOWLER

Abstract
Political advertising provides a key link between the politician and the public. The
concern over massive manipulation through political propaganda that drove early
empirical research on the subject has subsided; however, newer research concludes
that advertising can have nontrivial but short-lived influence on voter preferences.
Furthermore, increasing levels of negativity and concerns over the consequences of
such negativity spawned a heated debate in the literature over whether negative ads
stimulate or depress turnout at the polls with the most recent evidence suggesting
that it is the timing of negativity that determines its effect. Although advertising is
intended to persuade, research suggests the medium yields important informational
benefits, especially for citizens who do not pay a lot of attention to politics, and there
is little to suggest that negativity has large negative effects on the health of democracy. Although the 2012 election was a record-shattering year for political advertising,
campaigns are shifting to multi-platform communication strategies, which will bring
new challenges for researchers.

INTRODUCTION
Despite a myriad of changes over the last half century in the way in which
modern political campaigns are run, there remains one big constant: the
important role of political advertising as a central feature of the way in
which candidates communicate with citizens. Although campaigns are
increasingly utilizing the Internet as a central component of campaign
strategy, the use of television advertising has not declined (Ridout & Franz,
2011). Quite to the contrary, 2012 was—in fact—a record pulverizing year
for TV ad volume and spending (Fowler & Ridout, 2012). Whether the 2012
election represents the high water mark or not, there can be no doubt that
campaign advertising provides a key link between candidates for office
and the public they seek to represent, one that comprises the largest single
expenditure of modern campaigns (West, 2010).
Given the centrality of political advertising to campaigns and elections, it
should come as no surprise that the subject has garnered lavish attention
from political scientists examining advertising’s influence on citizen voting
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

preferences, turnout at the polls, knowledge and views of the political system
more broadly. The field has amassed a very large body of knowledge about
advertising effects, and yet in some ways, there are some important questions
that largely remain unanswered. This essay will attempt to outline the field
of research on advertising and discuss the current trajectory of cutting-edge
developments in the field before turning to critical issues for future research.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Studies of political advertising have focused on a number of questions
regarding its influence. In order to fully understand the effect of campaign
ads, it is important to acknowledge its multifaceted role, not just as a tool
of political persuasion, but also as a vehicle for potential mobilization
or suppression and provision of candidate information. As negativity is a
prominent and increasing feature of campaign advertising (Fowler & Ridout,
2011, 2012; Geer, 2006), many questions revolve specifically around the role
negative attacks play in advertising influence. Therefore, where appropriate,
the evidence regarding negativity will be discussed in conjunction with
advertising’s effect on persuasion, mobilization, citizen information, and
attitudes about government and democracy.
DO ADS PERSUADE?
The first and seemingly most straightforward question given the intended
goal of the medium is the extent to which political advertising actually
changes minds. Early empirical work on the influence of media largely
dismissed concerns over massive influence, concluding that advertising
had little to no effect as a tool of persuasion (Campbell, Converse, Miller, &
Stokes, 1960; Klapper, 1960; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). This
initial work ushered in an era of the so-called minimal effects, in which
scholars largely confirmed that media messages had minimal ability to
persuade. More recent work, however, recognized at least two problems
in the foundational conclusions. First, when messages compete, as is the
case in many electoral races, especially those for president, the two-sided
(competing) flows of information will likely cancel out any potential persuasive influence, which does not mean that the messages have no effect but
rather that we need to know when and where to look for effects (McGuire,
1986; Zaller, 1996). Second, we should not necessarily expect advertising to
influence all citizens or all candidates equally; strength of existing opinions
(or predispositions) matters (Bartels, 1993; Zaller, 1992).
To the extent that advertising has an influence, the influence is most likely
to be a marginal one, which is not to say that they do not matter. More than

Political Advertising

3

a few competitive elections are fought at the margin, where advertising may
matter a great deal. Indeed, newer scholarship has found that advertising
advantages—when one candidate has more ads on the air compared to his
or her opponent—do correspond with a decline in favorability for the targeted candidate (Kahn & Kenney, 2004) with larger benefits to challengers
than incumbents (Lau & Pomper, 2004; Ridout & Franz, 2011), in part due to
the asymmetrical amount of information citizens have about the candidates.
Popular wisdom suggests that negativity “works,” but academic evidence
that negative ads are more persuasive than positive ones is more tenuous.
Some argue that emotional appeals to anger or fear may matter more than
negativity (Brader, 2006), although a recent observational analysis had trouble finding consistent effects of emotional appeals (Ridout & Franz, 2011).
Research suggests that sponsors of negativity do experience some backlash,
or decline in support, due to negative attacks (Kahn & Geer, 1994; Lemert,
Wanta, & Lee, 2006); however, a recent meta-analysis of the field argued that
research examining the “net” persuasive effect of attacks (the decline in support for the targeted candidate minus the decline or backlash in support for
the favored candidate) is few and far between and that additional evidence
is needed to confirm overall effect (Lau, Sigelman, & Rovner, 2007).
The rise of interest group advertising in response to recent changes in the
campaign finance landscape (Franz, 2012) has raised interesting questions
and concerns over influence. These concerns are tied to negativity as interest
groups are more likely to air negative attacks than candidate-sponsored
airings (Fowler & Ridout, 2012; Franz, Freedman, Goldstein, & Ridout,
2008a). Candidates themselves do not shy away from negativity, but some
research suggests that interest group attacks may be more persuasive than
candidate-sponsored ones (Groenendyk & Valentino, 2002). Others argue
that the difference is not in persuasive power but rather that candidates
are less likely to suffer backlash from attacks aired by interest groups on
their behalf than if they air those same attacks themselves (Brooks & Murov,
2012). Additional work argues that the influence of interest group ads may
be moderated by the amount of information citizens have about the group
(Weber, Dunaway, & Johnson, 2012) or the disclosure of its financial donors
(Dowling & Wichowsky, 2013).
DO ADS AFFECT TURNOUT AT THE POLLS?
A heated scholarly debate regarding the influence of advertising on voter
turnout started with experimental analyses and some real-world replications
arguing that negativity had a large demobilizing effect on the American
electorate (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995; Ansolabehere, Iyengar, & Simon,
1999). Numerous researchers challenged the initial findings, arguing that

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

rather than demobilizing, negativity could actually mobilize citizens by
conveying the importance of what was at stake (Brader, 2006; Djupe &
Peterson, 2002; Freedman, Franz, & Goldstein, 2004; Freedman & Goldstein,
1999; Hillygus, 2005; Martin, 2004). Still others found no influence of advertising on turnout (Clinton & Lapinski, 2004; Finkel & Geer, 1998; Krasno &
Green, 2008). Assessing the large literature on the subject, Franz, Freedman,
Goldstein, and Ridout argue, “there is very little evidence that advertising,
whatever its other effects, has any negative effect on voter participation
in America” (2008b, p. 267). Lau et al. in summarizing their meta-analytic
assessment of the state of the field agree, stating that, “if anything negative
campaigning more frequently appears to have a slight mobilization effect”
(2007, p. 1184).
ADVERTISING’S RELATIONSHIP TO KNOWLEDGE AND INTEREST
Scholarship is more consistent regarding the influence of advertising and
negativity on citizen knowledge, recall and interest in the campaign.
Although advertising is intended to persuade, it often increases information
in the process. Studies of campaign spending argue that money spent
on the campaign correlates with increased citizen knowledge (Coleman &
Manna, 2000), which improves the quality of democracy. Moreover, evidence
suggests not only that advertising may increase voter information but also
that knowledge increases are especially noticeable among political novices
(Freedman et al., 2004; Ridout, Shah, Goldstein, & Franz, 2004). Negativity
may play an important role in increasing knowledge, given negative ads
have been shown to be more memorable than positive ones (Brians &
Wattenberg, 1996; Martin, 2004), contain more substantive information
compared to positive spots (Franz et al., 2008a; Geer, 2006) and stimulate
more interest in campaigns (Bartels, 2000; Brader, 2006; Marcus, Neuman, &
MacKuen, 2000).
ADVERTISING AND DEMOCRATIC HEALTH
We know that negativity corresponds with increased levels of information
and perhaps even a slight mobilization effect at the polls, but what about
the longer term influences of advertising and negativity on attitudes toward
the political system and citizens’ role in it? Though negative perceptions
tend to correspond with lower efficacy (Thorson, Ognianova, Coyle, &
Denton, 2000) and lower levels of trust in government (Lesher & Thorson,
2000), research that examines the influence of advertising itself finds little
evidence that negativity has harmful effects on trust or political efficacy
(Brooks & Geer, 2007; Geer, 2006; Jackson, Mondak, & Huckfeldt, 2009). In
sum, the literature tends to find advertising has positive (or at the very least
non-negative) democratic benefits.

Political Advertising

5

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
New and innovative work involving political advertising continues to
improve knowledge about its role as the central linkage between politician
and the public. Reporting on the results of the first large-scale experiment,
Gerber, Gimpel, Green, and Shaw (2011) employed $2 million of incumbent
Governor Rick Perry’s 2006 reelection funds on advertising in media markets
randomly assigned to different launch dates and volume of activity. By
pairing the experimental deployment of ads with daily tracking surveys and
a follow-up after the campaign’s end, the authors found that advertising
had a strong influence on voter preferences but also that the effects decayed
rapidly. More specifically, the results indicated that advertising was a
relatively inexpensive method of boosting citizen support for a favored
candidate but that the large, immediate increase in preference could no
longer be detected 1 or 2 weeks after the ad campaign’s end. In other words,
advertising’s power to persuade may be large but short-lived.
There is also new research that helps to explain the stalemate in the
literature on the question of mobilization. Scholar Yanna Krupnikov (2011,
2012) argues that the timing of exposure to negativity greatly influences the
extent to which its influence will be one of mobilization or demobilization.
In particular, Krupnikov’s argument and evidence suggest that negativity
before citizens make a choice of candidate can aid candidate selection but
encountering negativity about a chosen candidate after the individual has
made the decision to vote for that candidate may result in uncertainty about
the choice, leading to a demobilization effect. In other words, negativity has
a conditional effect on turnout that has everything to do with the timing of
exposure.
In addition to these key developments, new techniques from computer
science such as textual (and eventually video visual) analysis—where
computer-assisted clustering algorithms allow researchers to “efficiently
search over millions of potential categorizations schemes to identify interesting or useful organizations of the text” (Grimmer & Stewart, 2013)—hold
particular promise for the field of advertising and communication more
broadly. Political scientist Nick Beauchamp (2011), for example, uses a
“bottom-up” approach to ad effectiveness by predicting the influence of any
given ad based on the words of its script alone.

KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
In sum, we know a great deal about the influence of advertising. We know
that advertising can move citizen preferences though its effect is short-lived;
that to the extent that negativity influences turnout, the influence is more

6

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

likely to be a slight mobilization effect although the timing of exposure to
negative messages matters a great deal; that advertising has positive benefits for citizen knowledge, especially among the low-information public, and
that on balance advertising appears to contribute to democratic health. Key to
the development of advertising analysis in the real world (as opposed to the
laboratory) was the development and availability of comprehensive tracking services like Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), which deploys
“ad detectors” in each of the nation’s 210 media markets to track where and
when political ads air along with recording the actual spot itself. Thanks
to CMAG and the efforts of the Wisconsin Advertising Project (2000–2008)
and its successor, the Wesleyan Media Project (2010–present), the scholarly
community’s access to this frequency and content information has vastly
improved the study of campaign strategy and advertising influence. And
yet, in spite of the vast strides scholars have made on multiple fronts, big
questions remain.
Although advertising is intended to persuade, common sense tells us that
we should not expect all ads to be equally persuasive, and yet the vast majority of (especially observational) research ignores this complicating factor and
simply counts up the number of spots on each side, presuming that the candidate with the largest number of ads in any given market has the advantage.
Is it possible that one particularly powerful ad might trump or counteract
many hundred airings of a not-so-powerful one? And how, specifically,
do the content features of advertising correlate to persuasive influence?
The literature has little systematic or comprehensive guidance on either
subject.
As large as those questions are, there are even larger ones to come.
Although standard practice of micro-targeting messages through direct
mail has been around for a long time, there is evidence that campaigns
are now tailoring their advertising to specific audiences (Ridout, Franz,
Goldstein, & Feltus, 2012). Communication technology will allow campaigns
to increasingly personalize the content of messages while also increasing the
number of possible ways through which campaigns may reach citizens, and
these developments will occur by orders of magnitude. As the tide shifts
and campaigns move rapidly into a multi-platform advertising strategy
where a greater proportion of ads are viewed, discussed and shared online,
tracking that advertising placement let alone measuring its effect will
become increasingly difficult. As campaigns evolve, the tools of scholars,
including big data techniques enabling large quantitative mappings of
message sentiment and networks, will be especially important in keeping
up. Whether and how existing efforts to track campaign activities will be
sufficient remain to be seen.

Political Advertising

7

REFERENCES
Ansolabehere, S., & Iyengar, S. (1995). Going negative: How political advertisements
shrink and polarize the electorate. New York, NY: Free Press.
Ansolabehere, S., Iyengar, S., & Simon, A. (1999). Replicating experiments using
aggregate and survey data: The case of negative advertising and turnout. American
Political Science Review, 93, 901–909.
Bartels, L. M. (1993). Messages received: The political impact of media exposure.
American Political Science Review, 87, 267–285.
Bartels, L. M. (2000). Partisanship and voting behavior, 1952–1996. American Journal
of Political Science, 44, 35–50.
Beauchamp, N. (2011). A bottom-up approach to linguistic persuasion in advertising. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
Brader, T. (2006). Campaigning for hearts and minds: How emotional appeals in political
ads work. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Brians, C. L., & Wattenberg, M. P. (1996). Campaign issue knowledge and salience:
Comparing reception from TV commercials, TV news and newspapers. American
Journal of Political Science, 40, 172–193.
Brooks, D. J., & Geer, J. G. (2007). Beyond negativity: The effects of incivility on the
electorate. American Journal of Political Science, 51(January), 1–16.
Brooks, D. J., & Murov, M. (2012). Assessing accountability in a post-citizens united
era: The effects of attack ad sponsorship by unknown independent groups. American Politics Research, 40(3), 383–418.
Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American voter.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Clinton, J., & Lapinski, J. S. (2004). “Targeted” advertising and voter turnout:
An experimental study of the 2000 presidential election. Journal of Politics, 66,
69–96.
Coleman, J. J., & Manna, P. F. (2000). Congressional campaign spending and the quality of democracy. Journal of Politics, 62(3), 757–789.
Dowling, C. M., & Wichowsky, A. (2013). Does it matter who’s behind the curtain?
anonymity in political advertising and the Effects of Campaign Finance Disclosure. American Politics Research, 41(6), 965–996.
Djupe, P. A., & Peterson, D. A. M. (2002). The impact of negative campaigning:
Evidence from the 1998 senatorial primaries. Political Research Quarterly, 55(4),
845–860.
Finkel, S. E., & Geer, J. G. (1998). A spot check: Casting doubt on the demobilizing
effect of attack advertising. American Journal of Political Science, 42, 573–595.
Fowler, E. F., & Ridout, T. N. (2012). Negative, angry and ubiquitous: Political advertising in 2012. The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics,
10(4), 51–61.
Fowler, E. F., & Ridout, T. N. (2011). Advertising trends in 2010. The Forum: A Journal
of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, 8(4).
Franz, M. M. (2012). Interest groups in electoral politics: 2012 in context. The Forum:
A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, 10(4), 62–79.

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Franz, M. M., Freedman, P., Goldstein, K., & Ridout, T. N. (2008a). Campaign advertising and American democracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Franz, M. M., Freedman, P., Goldstein, K., & Ridout, T. N. (2008b). Understanding the
effect of political ads on voter turnout: A response to krasno and green. Journal of
Politics, 70(1), 262–268.
Freedman, P., Franz, M. M., & Goldstein, K. (2004). Campaign advertising and democratic citizenship. American Journal of Political Science, 48(4), 723–741.
Freedman, P., & Goldstein, K. M. (1999). Measuring media exposure and the effects
of negative campaign ads. American Journal of Political Science, 43, 1189–1208.
Geer, J. G. (2006). In defense of negativity: Attack ads in presidential campaigns. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gerber, A. S., Gimpel, J. G., Green, D. P., & Shaw, D. R. (2011). How large and
long-lasting are the persuasive effects of televised campaign ads? Results from
a randomized field experiment. American Political Science Review, 105(01), 135–150.
Grimmer, J., & Stewart, B. M. (2013). Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis, 21(3), 267–297.
Groenendyk, E. W., & Valentino, N. A. (2002). Of dark clouds and silver linings:
Effects of exposure to issue versus candidate advertising on persuasion, information retention, and issue salience. Communication Research, 29, 295–319.
Hillygus, D. S. (2005). Campaign effects and the dynamics of turnout intention in
election 2000. Journal of Politics, 67(1), 50–68.
Jackson, R. A., Mondak, J. J., & Huckfeldt, R. (2009). Examining the possible corrosive impact of negative advertising on citizens’ attitudes toward politics. Political
Research Quarterly, 62(1), 55–69.
Kahn, K. F., & Geer, J. G. (1994). Creating impressions: An experimental investigation
of political advertising on television. Political Behavior, 16(1), 93–116.
Kahn, K. F., & Kenney, P. J. (2004). No holds barred: Negativity in U.S. Senate campaigns.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Klapper, J. T. (1960). The effects of mass communication. New York, NY: Free Press.
Krasno, J. S., & Green, D. P. (2008). Do televised presidential ads increase voter
turnout? Evidence from a natural experiment. Journal of Politics, 70(1), 245–261.
Krupnikov, Y. (2011). When does negativity demobilize? Tracing the conditional
effect of negative campaigning on voter turnout. American Journal of Political Science, 55(4), 797–813. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00522.x
Krupnikov, Y. (2012). Negative advertising and voter choice: The role of ads in
candidate selection. Political Communication, 29(4), 387–413. doi:10.1080/10584609.
2012.721868
Lau, R., & Pomper, G. (2004). Negative campaigning: An analysis of US Senate elections.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lau, R., Sigelman, L., & Rovner, I. B. (2007). The effects of negative political advertisements: A meta-analytic reassessment. Journal of Politics, 69, 1176–1209.
Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). The people’s choice: How the voter
makes up his mind in a presidential campaign. New York, NY: Columbia University
Press.

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9

Lemert, J. B., Wanta, W., & Lee, T. T. (2006). Party identification and negative advertising in a US Senate election. Journal of Communication, 49(2), 123–134.
Lesher, G., & Thorson, E. (2000). Overreporting voting: Campaign media, public
mood, and the vote. Political Communication, 17(July–September), 263–278.
Marcus, G. E., Neuman, W. R., & MacKuen, M. (2000). Affective intelligence and political
judgment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, P. S. (2004). Inside the black box of negative campaign effects: Three reasons
why negative campaigns mobilize. Political Psychology, 25(4), 545–562.
McGuire, W. J. (1986). The myth of massive media impact: Savaging and salvagings.
In G. Comstock (Ed.), Public communication and behavior (Vol. 1, pp. 173–257).
Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Ridout, T. N., & Franz, M. (2011). The persuasive power of campaign advertising. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Ridout, T. N., Franz, M., Goldstein, K. M., & Feltus, W. J. (2012). Separation by television program: Understanding the targeting of political advertising in presidential
elections. Political Communication, 29(1), 1–23.
Ridout, T. N., Shah, D., Goldstein, K., & Franz, M. (2004). Evaluating measures of
campaign advertising exposure on political learning. Political Behavior, 26, 201–225.
Thorson, E., Ognianova, E., Coyle, J., & Denton, F. (2000). Negative political ads and
negative citizen orientations toward politics. Journal of Current Issues and Research
in Advertising, 22, 13–40.
Weber, C., Dunaway, J., & Johnson, T. (2012). Its all in the name: Source cue ambiguity
and the persuasive appeal of campaign ads. Political Behavior, 34(3), 561–584.
West, D. M. (2010). Air wars: Television advertising in election campaigns, 1952–2008.
Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Zaller, J. (1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.
Zaller, J. (1996). The myth of massive media impact revived: New support for a discredited
idea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

ERIKA FRANKLIN FOWLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Erika Franklin Fowler (PhD, University of Wisconsin—Madison) is assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University where she directs the
Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks and analyzes all political ads aired on
broadcast television in real-time during elections. Fowler specializes in political communication research, focusing on local media and campaign advertising in particular, and her work has been published in political science,
communication, law/policy, and medical journals. Fowler teaches courses in
American politics, media and politics, public opinion, and empirical methods. She has secured roughly a half million dollars in grants supporting the
Wesleyan Media Project’s efforts and her other research, and her work with
the Media Project has been cited extensively in the nation’s leading media
outlets. Fowler graduated summa cum laude with a BA in mathematics and

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

political science from St. Olaf College, and prior to arriving at Wesleyan, she
spent 2 years as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at
the University of Michigan.
RELATED ESSAYS
Domestic Politics of Trade Policy (Political Science), Michaël Aklin et al.
Party Organizations’ Electioneering Arms Race (Political Science), John H.
Aldrich and Jeffrey D. Grynaviski
Economic Models of Voting (Political Science), Ian G. Anson and Timothy
Hellwig
The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office (Political Science), Sarah
F. Anzia
Political Ideologies (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and Nicholas J.
D’Amico
Government Formation and Cabinets (Political Science), Sona N. Golder
Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless
Civic Engagement (Sociology), Peter Levine
Participatory Governance (Political Science), Stephanie L. McNulty and Brian
Wampler
Money in Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey Milyo
Electoral Authoritarianism (Political Science), Andreas Schedler
Does the 1 Person 1 Vote Principle Apply? (Political Science), Ian R. Turner
et al.
Constitutionalism (Political Science), Keith E. Whittington


Political Advertising
ERIKA FRANKLIN FOWLER

Abstract
Political advertising provides a key link between the politician and the public. The
concern over massive manipulation through political propaganda that drove early
empirical research on the subject has subsided; however, newer research concludes
that advertising can have nontrivial but short-lived influence on voter preferences.
Furthermore, increasing levels of negativity and concerns over the consequences of
such negativity spawned a heated debate in the literature over whether negative ads
stimulate or depress turnout at the polls with the most recent evidence suggesting
that it is the timing of negativity that determines its effect. Although advertising is
intended to persuade, research suggests the medium yields important informational
benefits, especially for citizens who do not pay a lot of attention to politics, and there
is little to suggest that negativity has large negative effects on the health of democracy. Although the 2012 election was a record-shattering year for political advertising,
campaigns are shifting to multi-platform communication strategies, which will bring
new challenges for researchers.

INTRODUCTION
Despite a myriad of changes over the last half century in the way in which
modern political campaigns are run, there remains one big constant: the
important role of political advertising as a central feature of the way in
which candidates communicate with citizens. Although campaigns are
increasingly utilizing the Internet as a central component of campaign
strategy, the use of television advertising has not declined (Ridout & Franz,
2011). Quite to the contrary, 2012 was—in fact—a record pulverizing year
for TV ad volume and spending (Fowler & Ridout, 2012). Whether the 2012
election represents the high water mark or not, there can be no doubt that
campaign advertising provides a key link between candidates for office
and the public they seek to represent, one that comprises the largest single
expenditure of modern campaigns (West, 2010).
Given the centrality of political advertising to campaigns and elections, it
should come as no surprise that the subject has garnered lavish attention
from political scientists examining advertising’s influence on citizen voting
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

1

2

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

preferences, turnout at the polls, knowledge and views of the political system
more broadly. The field has amassed a very large body of knowledge about
advertising effects, and yet in some ways, there are some important questions
that largely remain unanswered. This essay will attempt to outline the field
of research on advertising and discuss the current trajectory of cutting-edge
developments in the field before turning to critical issues for future research.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Studies of political advertising have focused on a number of questions
regarding its influence. In order to fully understand the effect of campaign
ads, it is important to acknowledge its multifaceted role, not just as a tool
of political persuasion, but also as a vehicle for potential mobilization
or suppression and provision of candidate information. As negativity is a
prominent and increasing feature of campaign advertising (Fowler & Ridout,
2011, 2012; Geer, 2006), many questions revolve specifically around the role
negative attacks play in advertising influence. Therefore, where appropriate,
the evidence regarding negativity will be discussed in conjunction with
advertising’s effect on persuasion, mobilization, citizen information, and
attitudes about government and democracy.
DO ADS PERSUADE?
The first and seemingly most straightforward question given the intended
goal of the medium is the extent to which political advertising actually
changes minds. Early empirical work on the influence of media largely
dismissed concerns over massive influence, concluding that advertising
had little to no effect as a tool of persuasion (Campbell, Converse, Miller, &
Stokes, 1960; Klapper, 1960; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). This
initial work ushered in an era of the so-called minimal effects, in which
scholars largely confirmed that media messages had minimal ability to
persuade. More recent work, however, recognized at least two problems
in the foundational conclusions. First, when messages compete, as is the
case in many electoral races, especially those for president, the two-sided
(competing) flows of information will likely cancel out any potential persuasive influence, which does not mean that the messages have no effect but
rather that we need to know when and where to look for effects (McGuire,
1986; Zaller, 1996). Second, we should not necessarily expect advertising to
influence all citizens or all candidates equally; strength of existing opinions
(or predispositions) matters (Bartels, 1993; Zaller, 1992).
To the extent that advertising has an influence, the influence is most likely
to be a marginal one, which is not to say that they do not matter. More than

Political Advertising

3

a few competitive elections are fought at the margin, where advertising may
matter a great deal. Indeed, newer scholarship has found that advertising
advantages—when one candidate has more ads on the air compared to his
or her opponent—do correspond with a decline in favorability for the targeted candidate (Kahn & Kenney, 2004) with larger benefits to challengers
than incumbents (Lau & Pomper, 2004; Ridout & Franz, 2011), in part due to
the asymmetrical amount of information citizens have about the candidates.
Popular wisdom suggests that negativity “works,” but academic evidence
that negative ads are more persuasive than positive ones is more tenuous.
Some argue that emotional appeals to anger or fear may matter more than
negativity (Brader, 2006), although a recent observational analysis had trouble finding consistent effects of emotional appeals (Ridout & Franz, 2011).
Research suggests that sponsors of negativity do experience some backlash,
or decline in support, due to negative attacks (Kahn & Geer, 1994; Lemert,
Wanta, & Lee, 2006); however, a recent meta-analysis of the field argued that
research examining the “net” persuasive effect of attacks (the decline in support for the targeted candidate minus the decline or backlash in support for
the favored candidate) is few and far between and that additional evidence
is needed to confirm overall effect (Lau, Sigelman, & Rovner, 2007).
The rise of interest group advertising in response to recent changes in the
campaign finance landscape (Franz, 2012) has raised interesting questions
and concerns over influence. These concerns are tied to negativity as interest
groups are more likely to air negative attacks than candidate-sponsored
airings (Fowler & Ridout, 2012; Franz, Freedman, Goldstein, & Ridout,
2008a). Candidates themselves do not shy away from negativity, but some
research suggests that interest group attacks may be more persuasive than
candidate-sponsored ones (Groenendyk & Valentino, 2002). Others argue
that the difference is not in persuasive power but rather that candidates
are less likely to suffer backlash from attacks aired by interest groups on
their behalf than if they air those same attacks themselves (Brooks & Murov,
2012). Additional work argues that the influence of interest group ads may
be moderated by the amount of information citizens have about the group
(Weber, Dunaway, & Johnson, 2012) or the disclosure of its financial donors
(Dowling & Wichowsky, 2013).
DO ADS AFFECT TURNOUT AT THE POLLS?
A heated scholarly debate regarding the influence of advertising on voter
turnout started with experimental analyses and some real-world replications
arguing that negativity had a large demobilizing effect on the American
electorate (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995; Ansolabehere, Iyengar, & Simon,
1999). Numerous researchers challenged the initial findings, arguing that

4

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

rather than demobilizing, negativity could actually mobilize citizens by
conveying the importance of what was at stake (Brader, 2006; Djupe &
Peterson, 2002; Freedman, Franz, & Goldstein, 2004; Freedman & Goldstein,
1999; Hillygus, 2005; Martin, 2004). Still others found no influence of advertising on turnout (Clinton & Lapinski, 2004; Finkel & Geer, 1998; Krasno &
Green, 2008). Assessing the large literature on the subject, Franz, Freedman,
Goldstein, and Ridout argue, “there is very little evidence that advertising,
whatever its other effects, has any negative effect on voter participation
in America” (2008b, p. 267). Lau et al. in summarizing their meta-analytic
assessment of the state of the field agree, stating that, “if anything negative
campaigning more frequently appears to have a slight mobilization effect”
(2007, p. 1184).
ADVERTISING’S RELATIONSHIP TO KNOWLEDGE AND INTEREST
Scholarship is more consistent regarding the influence of advertising and
negativity on citizen knowledge, recall and interest in the campaign.
Although advertising is intended to persuade, it often increases information
in the process. Studies of campaign spending argue that money spent
on the campaign correlates with increased citizen knowledge (Coleman &
Manna, 2000), which improves the quality of democracy. Moreover, evidence
suggests not only that advertising may increase voter information but also
that knowledge increases are especially noticeable among political novices
(Freedman et al., 2004; Ridout, Shah, Goldstein, & Franz, 2004). Negativity
may play an important role in increasing knowledge, given negative ads
have been shown to be more memorable than positive ones (Brians &
Wattenberg, 1996; Martin, 2004), contain more substantive information
compared to positive spots (Franz et al., 2008a; Geer, 2006) and stimulate
more interest in campaigns (Bartels, 2000; Brader, 2006; Marcus, Neuman, &
MacKuen, 2000).
ADVERTISING AND DEMOCRATIC HEALTH
We know that negativity corresponds with increased levels of information
and perhaps even a slight mobilization effect at the polls, but what about
the longer term influences of advertising and negativity on attitudes toward
the political system and citizens’ role in it? Though negative perceptions
tend to correspond with lower efficacy (Thorson, Ognianova, Coyle, &
Denton, 2000) and lower levels of trust in government (Lesher & Thorson,
2000), research that examines the influence of advertising itself finds little
evidence that negativity has harmful effects on trust or political efficacy
(Brooks & Geer, 2007; Geer, 2006; Jackson, Mondak, & Huckfeldt, 2009). In
sum, the literature tends to find advertising has positive (or at the very least
non-negative) democratic benefits.

Political Advertising

5

CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
New and innovative work involving political advertising continues to
improve knowledge about its role as the central linkage between politician
and the public. Reporting on the results of the first large-scale experiment,
Gerber, Gimpel, Green, and Shaw (2011) employed $2 million of incumbent
Governor Rick Perry’s 2006 reelection funds on advertising in media markets
randomly assigned to different launch dates and volume of activity. By
pairing the experimental deployment of ads with daily tracking surveys and
a follow-up after the campaign’s end, the authors found that advertising
had a strong influence on voter preferences but also that the effects decayed
rapidly. More specifically, the results indicated that advertising was a
relatively inexpensive method of boosting citizen support for a favored
candidate but that the large, immediate increase in preference could no
longer be detected 1 or 2 weeks after the ad campaign’s end. In other words,
advertising’s power to persuade may be large but short-lived.
There is also new research that helps to explain the stalemate in the
literature on the question of mobilization. Scholar Yanna Krupnikov (2011,
2012) argues that the timing of exposure to negativity greatly influences the
extent to which its influence will be one of mobilization or demobilization.
In particular, Krupnikov’s argument and evidence suggest that negativity
before citizens make a choice of candidate can aid candidate selection but
encountering negativity about a chosen candidate after the individual has
made the decision to vote for that candidate may result in uncertainty about
the choice, leading to a demobilization effect. In other words, negativity has
a conditional effect on turnout that has everything to do with the timing of
exposure.
In addition to these key developments, new techniques from computer
science such as textual (and eventually video visual) analysis—where
computer-assisted clustering algorithms allow researchers to “efficiently
search over millions of potential categorizations schemes to identify interesting or useful organizations of the text” (Grimmer & Stewart, 2013)—hold
particular promise for the field of advertising and communication more
broadly. Political scientist Nick Beauchamp (2011), for example, uses a
“bottom-up” approach to ad effectiveness by predicting the influence of any
given ad based on the words of its script alone.

KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
In sum, we know a great deal about the influence of advertising. We know
that advertising can move citizen preferences though its effect is short-lived;
that to the extent that negativity influences turnout, the influence is more

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

likely to be a slight mobilization effect although the timing of exposure to
negative messages matters a great deal; that advertising has positive benefits for citizen knowledge, especially among the low-information public, and
that on balance advertising appears to contribute to democratic health. Key to
the development of advertising analysis in the real world (as opposed to the
laboratory) was the development and availability of comprehensive tracking services like Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), which deploys
“ad detectors” in each of the nation’s 210 media markets to track where and
when political ads air along with recording the actual spot itself. Thanks
to CMAG and the efforts of the Wisconsin Advertising Project (2000–2008)
and its successor, the Wesleyan Media Project (2010–present), the scholarly
community’s access to this frequency and content information has vastly
improved the study of campaign strategy and advertising influence. And
yet, in spite of the vast strides scholars have made on multiple fronts, big
questions remain.
Although advertising is intended to persuade, common sense tells us that
we should not expect all ads to be equally persuasive, and yet the vast majority of (especially observational) research ignores this complicating factor and
simply counts up the number of spots on each side, presuming that the candidate with the largest number of ads in any given market has the advantage.
Is it possible that one particularly powerful ad might trump or counteract
many hundred airings of a not-so-powerful one? And how, specifically,
do the content features of advertising correlate to persuasive influence?
The literature has little systematic or comprehensive guidance on either
subject.
As large as those questions are, there are even larger ones to come.
Although standard practice of micro-targeting messages through direct
mail has been around for a long time, there is evidence that campaigns
are now tailoring their advertising to specific audiences (Ridout, Franz,
Goldstein, & Feltus, 2012). Communication technology will allow campaigns
to increasingly personalize the content of messages while also increasing the
number of possible ways through which campaigns may reach citizens, and
these developments will occur by orders of magnitude. As the tide shifts
and campaigns move rapidly into a multi-platform advertising strategy
where a greater proportion of ads are viewed, discussed and shared online,
tracking that advertising placement let alone measuring its effect will
become increasingly difficult. As campaigns evolve, the tools of scholars,
including big data techniques enabling large quantitative mappings of
message sentiment and networks, will be especially important in keeping
up. Whether and how existing efforts to track campaign activities will be
sufficient remain to be seen.

Political Advertising

7

REFERENCES
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Franz, M. M., Freedman, P., Goldstein, K., & Ridout, T. N. (2008a). Campaign advertising and American democracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
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Lemert, J. B., Wanta, W., & Lee, T. T. (2006). Party identification and negative advertising in a US Senate election. Journal of Communication, 49(2), 123–134.
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campaign advertising exposure on political learning. Political Behavior, 26, 201–225.
Thorson, E., Ognianova, E., Coyle, J., & Denton, F. (2000). Negative political ads and
negative citizen orientations toward politics. Journal of Current Issues and Research
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idea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

ERIKA FRANKLIN FOWLER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Erika Franklin Fowler (PhD, University of Wisconsin—Madison) is assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University where she directs the
Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks and analyzes all political ads aired on
broadcast television in real-time during elections. Fowler specializes in political communication research, focusing on local media and campaign advertising in particular, and her work has been published in political science,
communication, law/policy, and medical journals. Fowler teaches courses in
American politics, media and politics, public opinion, and empirical methods. She has secured roughly a half million dollars in grants supporting the
Wesleyan Media Project’s efforts and her other research, and her work with
the Media Project has been cited extensively in the nation’s leading media
outlets. Fowler graduated summa cum laude with a BA in mathematics and

10

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

political science from St. Olaf College, and prior to arriving at Wesleyan, she
spent 2 years as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at
the University of Michigan.
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Media

Political Advertising