Campaign Advertising Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Campaign advertising is the use of paid-for political ads to communicate a political party or candidate’s message to the public, in an effort to influence decision making and win votes. Campaign ads provide the opportunity to send carefully crafted, unadulterated messages directly to the electorate and are an integral component of the information environment in an election campaign. While campaign advertising is primarily associated with American-style, candidate-centered campaigns, campaign advertising also features in-party– centered systems found across Europe. In recent years however, nonparty-based organizations have increased their use of paid-for political advertising to influence ballot measures resulting from initiative or referendum processes. For example, in November 2008 California voters passed Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, after record breaking spending on advertising funded largely by religious groups, including $20 million from the Mormon Church. Across Europe, campaign advertising for the European No Campaign on the European Union (EU) Constitution was managed outside traditional party organizations and funded primarily by wealthy individuals from member states.

The Postmodern Campaign

Proposition 8 illustrates another key feature of campaign advertising—the move from the modern campaign, where advertising was based predominantly on broadcast television and radio advertising, to the postmodern campaign, characterized by the use of advertising mediums driven by advances in information and communication technologies (e.g., the Internet, mobile phones, and social networking sites) to target ads to voters based on their self-identified most important issue. Using sophisticated databases and mapping technology like GeoVote and Voter Vault, parties and candidates are able to micro target messages to individual voters based on sociodemographic characteristics, consumer behavior, and values, thus maximizing the opportunity to get the right message to the right voter. The Obama campaign in the United States successfully targeted younger voters in battleground states using mobile phone technology, and in the United Kingdom, the Tories have used Spotify, a music streaming service, to target a message on debt to young people and encourage them to vote Conservative in the next election.

Advances in information and communication technology pose problems for campaign advertising, which has been subject to extensive regulation. In the United States, campaign advertising for federal (national) office is regulated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and governed by key legislation including the Federal Elections Campaign Act (FECA; 1971, 1974) and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA; 2002). The FEC is charged with maintaining transparency and accountability by regulating the source, disclosure, and sponsorship requirements of campaign advertisements. Since the BCRA, two standards are applied in regulating ads: express advocacy and electioneering communications. However, the electioneering communications standard only applies to campaign ads appearing on broadcast, cable, or satellite transmission, exempting many other advertising media: newspapers; direct mail; billboards or posters; and electronic media, including Internet websites, email, and social networking sites.

The regulatory focus on broadcast advertising stems from the growing number of, resources allocated to, and unintended consequences of (particularly) negative ads. The thirty-second television spot, the workhorse of campaign advertising, is the primary means by which citizens are exposed to campaign ads, and the use of spots for presidential and congressional elections has increased dramatically since 2000. Indeed, many critics claim the costs associated with the production and airtime required for television ads are largely responsible for the significant increases in campaign spending. This charge is not without merit: Fundraising for the 2008 election totaled over $3 billion for federal candidates, with fundraising in the presidential race alone up 80 percent from 2004. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain spent $440 million on national ads alone, producing some six hundred thousand airings.

Since 2000, the Wisconsin Advertising Project, using data from TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, has made available data on the content, targeting, and frequency of political ads. This has helped provide some of the empirical evidence for perhaps the key debate surrounding campaign advertising: the increased use and consequences of negative ads. Scholars, politicians, pundits, and journalists have expressed concern for the (un)intended consequences of negative advertising on the health of representative democracy, and more specifically on voter learning, engagement, and turnout.

Negative Ads

While a dominant feature of recent U.S. elections, the use of negative ads is not a new phenomenon. In the 1964 presidential election, Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy Girl” television ad capitalized on Barry Goldwater’s threat to use nuclear weapons in the ongoing U.S. conflict in Vietnam. The ad, which ran only once (bowing to Republican Party protest), contrasted a young girl playfully counting petals pulled from a flower in a field of daisies and a male voiceover counting down a nuclear launch; the girl was eventually subsumed in the blackened mushroom cloud. The controversial “Daisy Girl,” former president George H. W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad linking Michael Dukakis with murderer Willie Horton, and the 527 group’s “Swift Boat Veterans” campaign ad attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam service record are now classic examples of how negative ads can successfully influence the discourse, direction, and outcome of election campaigns.

However, there is some risk to negative advertising, because ads can backfire. In Britain, the Conservative Party’s “Demon Eyes” ad aimed to reframe Tony Blair’s broad smile and wide eyes, once considered positive attributes, to reveal his underlying insincerity and untrustworthiness. Whilst the Conservatives were censured by the Advertising Standards Agency for portraying Blair as sinister and dishonest, the ad also crystallized public opinion against the Tories, who, in the public’s eyes, were seen as out of touch, unduly negative, and desperate.

Scholarly evidence from experimental and survey research on how negative ads impact mobilization and participation is mixed. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar’s (1995) benchmark study found that negative advertising suppresses turnout, particularly for the nonpartisan electorate, which may serve to incentivize candidates who benefit from low turnout to engage in this form of advertising. More recently, evidence suggests that negative advertising depresses the public mood, which has indirect and unequal effects on turnout. While the thirty-second spot has been vilified for increasing the perceived superficiality of the information environment and the so-called dumbing down of political discourse, a number of studies have found positive effects of negative advertising. With this, scholars have disputed the demobilization hypothesis with evidence suggesting that negative advertising can actually stimulate turnout. Furthermore, John Geer (2000, 2006) has shown that negative ads hold a higher information content than positive ads, are more issue than trait or value oriented, and are more likely to be supported by evidence.

Some of the disparity in the findings about the impact of negative advertising stems from the debate over defining negativity. Many have argued that negative ads have a legitimate place in campaigns and elections because they make genuine contrasts between candidates (parties) on policy, ideology or traits, whereas “attack” advertising serve no other purpose than to malign and assail the opposition. Thus, on normative grounds, there appears to be little justification for limiting the use of negative ads, as they serve an important role in transferring information from the candidate or party to the voter; however, a similar case cannot be made for attack ads that stretch the boundaries between truth and fiction and serve to obfuscate the actuality of party, policy, or personal realities. A number of studies have failed to make this distinction, relying on a two-category comparison of positive versus negative ads in lieu of more refined categorization demarcating positive versus negative, comparative, or contrast ads, or comparing positive ads to attack ads across trait or issue appeals. Thus, differences in conceptualization and measurement of negative advertising may contribute to the ongoing empirical debate over their impact on representative democracy.

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