04.02.08
Do Negative Campaign Ads Work?
Welcome to the Oscar Show, a weekly program focusing on scholarship, creativity and research, produced by WTJU and the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia, I’m Jacob Canon.
In last week’s show we examined the research of UVa graduate student Karsten Nohl who demonstrated that the encryption used by the now ubiquitous smart card is much easier to break than previously thought.
In today’s show, adapted from an article recently published on the Oscar Web site written by Brevy Cannon, we look at the research of University of Virginia politics professor Paul Freedman which suggests that the ever-growing barrage of political ads actually contributes to citizen education and engagement, and only rarely have negative impacts.
Television viewers may instinctively reach for the remote control when yet another political ad airs during a commercial break, but those who stay tuned may reap some surprising benefits.
Campaign Advertising and American Democracy, suggests that the ever-growing barrage of political ads actually contributes to citizen education and engagement, and only rarely has negative impacts. And according to reviewer Darrell West of Brown University, is “the most comprehensive examination of political advertising that has been attempted to date.”
Written by University of Virginia politics professor Paul Freedman, Michael M. Franz, assistant professor at Bowdoin College; Kenneth M. Goldstein, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Travis N. Ridout, assistant professor at Washington State University in Pullman, the book examines the political advertising of the 2004 election season.
It has been estimated that more than 3 million political ads were televised leading up to the 2004 elections, and in the race for the White House more than $800 million dollars were spent alone. Presidential candidates, along with their parties and interest-group allies, broadcast over a million ads — more than twice the number aired before the 2000 elections.
But according to the authors’ research, being barraged by political ads turns out to be a good thing. Freedman said, he sees political TV ads as “frequently informative, often funny, usually clever, and just a whole lot of fun… Only in the rarest of circumstances do they have negative impacts.”
Political ads, especially negative ads, have a bad reputation. But Freedman and his co-authors found that negative ads, in particular those that draw contrasts between a candidate and his or her opponent’s positions on issues or past record, turn out to have the most measurable positive effects.
Freedman, an election analyst for ABC News in New York since 2000, said, “candidates realize the importance of responding to opponents’ ads that raise questions about their records, character or issue stances, so negative ads help hold candidates accountable.” He went on to say, “we found that the more ads that people are exposed to, the more likely they are to vote.”
Freedman said, “this does not show a direct cause-and-effect relationship, such as X dollars spent on TV advertising buys Y number of votes, but this is a stark example of how polling numbers track and mirror the strategic decisions by campaigns.” He went on to say, “Just as citizens and the polls respond to advertising, candidates respond to the polls. They make strategic decisions based on what the contest looks like at any point in time.
The average American has an “impoverished diet of political information, and TV ads can be thought of as informational multi-vitamin, wrapped up in emotional coding, positive or negative, that makes it easier to swallow the substantive information, which is usually accurate and often backed up with footnotes or references to newspaper passages.”
While some pundits consider most political TV ads “nasty, brutish and short” — an annoyance at best, and at worst, corrosive to democratic citizenship and debasing to political discourse, according to their research, just the “sorts of ads most disliked by pundits, are the ones most likely to educate, engage and mobilize voters.”
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when our topic will be the research of Rob Cross, associate professor in the McIntire School of Commerce, and his work helping businesses discover potential bottlenecks or disconnects in the network — providing information that is critical for businesses to improve.
Stay Tuned for a very important announcement…
The Oscar Show » Reconsidering the Presidency said,
July 9, 2008 at 11:50 am
[…] Sununu also decried how today’s media have “poisoned the minds of the public” with flawed coverage of political issues like the Florida recounts in the 2000 presidential election. While one questioner defended the role of the media as “the fourth branch of government,” no participants even entertained the idea that political advertising might benefit the political process, such as by increasing voter knowledge and participation, as recent research from U.Va. politics professor Paul Freedman has found. […]