A Spot Check: Casting Doubt on the Demobilizing Effect of Attack Advertising

Finkel, Steven E.; Geer, John G.

doi:10.2307/2991771

Cited by 257 publications

(203 citation statements)

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“…In the decade since Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) published findings showing that negative advertising depressed voter turnout, especially among Independents, other scholars have criticized their methodology (Bartels 1996;Brooks 2006) and reported different effects. Finkel and Geer (1998) found no evidence of demobilization of Independents from negative ads. Pomper (2000, 2001) found that effects on Independents varied with the amount of negative advertising exposure: Independents who were exposed 1 to a campaign which contained a moderate amount of negative ads showed no statistically significant evidence of such an influence, but exposure to high levels of negative advertising-negativism above 90% (an amount that was higher than their actual campaign observation)-was significantly related to a decline in predicted voter turnout for Independents.…”

mentioning

confidence: 68%

What's Good for the Goose is Bad for the Gander: Negative Political Advertising, Partisanship, and Turnout

Stevens

Sullivan

Allen

et al. 2008

The Journal of Politics

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This study examines citizens' perceptions of fairness and legitimacy in political advertising. Using focus groups, an original national survey, and data on election 2000, as well as drawing on results from a replication of the national survey in 2004, we characterize political ads from the citizen's perspective. We then turn to the impact of ''negative'' advertising on voter turnout. Like several studies, we find circumstances under which turnout can be increased by negative ad criticisms. However, we show that this general result is only part of the story. Drawing on research in political psychology, we suggest that voters are ''motivated processors'' of advertising claims; as such, they evaluate the fairness of an ad according to their partisan predispositions. We show that when partisans perceive the criticisms of their own party's candidate to be fair, they are less likely to say they will vote. As a result, we find that negative advertising not only may affect the total turnout in an election but also has an important and varying impact on the composition of the electorate.H ow does ''negative'' campaign advertising affect the American electorate? In recent years the impact of negative ads has been the subject of a great debate fueled by diverse methodologies and equally diverse answers. Political scientists and pundits have been especially alarmed by suggestions that negative ads may affect partisans and independents differently, depressing turnout for the latter, while stimulating turnout of the former. Concerns about the influence of political advertising, including misgivings about the increase and impact of negative campaign ads, are a subset of two more general issues confronting the American polity: worries about declining participation in elections and the prospect of an increasingly polarized electorate. Given perceptions of the high stakes and close contests of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the precise composition of the electorate at the polls is also of critical interest. Our research offers new evidence about how voters characterize ''negative'' or ''attack'' ads and, in light of these characterizations, how negative ads affect electoral participation, polarization, and composition. We demonstrate that voters' partisanship substantially colors perceptions of legitimate negativity in advertising and that these characterizations in turn affect who goes to the polls. As a consequence, some negative advertising campaigns may stimulate while others depress overall turnout, but more than the total turnout is at stake. Negative advertising also affects the composition of the electorate since partisans and independents experience an advertising stimulus (or deterrent) differently.Electoral campaigns are increasingly ''going negative'' as Geer (2006), among others, has documented. In the decade since Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) published findings showing that negative advertising depressed voter turnout, especially among Independents, other scholars have criticized their methodology (Bar...

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mentioning

confidence: 68%

What's Good for the Goose is Bad for the Gander: Negative Political Advertising, Partisanship, and Turnout

Stevens

Sullivan

Allen

et al. 2008

The Journal of Politics

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“…Previous research suggests that a possible reason that negative campaigning works is because it stimulates a more immediate emotional response from voters (Finkel and Geer, 1998). If invoking an emotional response is the primary mechanism behind negative campaign messages, we would expect differences between messages to be stronger in fundraising but not in voter turnout, as previous research has found the impact of emotional states on behavior to diminish over time (Adler et al, 1998;Grimm and Mengel, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Second, they allow us to examine explanations for differences between positive and negative messages. In particular, we consider whether the subjects found the negative messages more informative, as Finkel and Geer (1998) posit this difference as a potential mechanism negative advertising's effect as discussed above.…”

Section: Pre-experimental Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Campaigning, Fundraising, and Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment

2013

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JEL classification: D72 C93 M37 Keywords:Voter turnout Negative campaigning Comparative advertising Fundraising Field experiment a b s t r a c t Why do candidates risk alienating voters by engaging in negative campaigning? One answer may lie in the large empirical literature indicating that negative messages are more effective than positive messages in getting individuals to do many things, including voting and purchasing goods. Few contributions to this literature, however, gather data from a field environment with messages whose tone has been validated. We conduct field experiments in two elections for local office which test the effect of confirmed negative and positive letters sent to candidates' partisans on two measurable activities: donating to the candidate and turning out to vote. We find that message tone increases partisan support in ways that may help explain the persistence of negative campaigning. Negative messages are no better than positive messages at earning the candidates donations, but negative messages yield significantly higher rates of voter turnout among the candidates' partisans relative to positive messages. Positive messages, however, are not neutral relative to no message.

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“…Since the marginal effects of attack and promotion on a candidate's effective effort are decreasing (because β < 1), the "impact effect" is high for heterogeneous values of attack and promotion and is small for homogeneous values of attack and promotion levels. Then, when comparing different States elections or National elections, one compares heterogeneous populations in term of sensitivities to attack and promotion, and then, one can observe a positive correlation between attack and participation (when the populations are almost equally sensitive to both tones) like in Wattenberg and Brians (1999), or a negative correlation (when the populations are very sensitive to one of the tone) like in AISV (1994) , or one can observe no correlation (when the range of sensitivities is large) like in Finkel and Geer (1998).…”

Section: Proposition 4 There Exists a Unique Equilibrium And The Equmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This result would come from the fact that negative advertising may have a positive informative effect on voters; Ansolabehere, Iyengar and Simon (1999) respond to this "criticism" in reanalyzing NES data from 1992 and confirm their first conclusion. As for Finkel and Geer (1998), using NES survey data set of presidential campaign advertisement from 1960 to 1992, they find that attack has no negative effect on voters turnout. Delving deeper into details, Kahn and Kenney (1999) , distinguish two kinds of negative campaign advertising: useful negative advertising and mudslinging.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Contest with Attack and Defence: Does Negative Campaigning Increase or Decrease Voters' Turnout?

Soubeyran

2005

SSRN Journal

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We present a general model of two players contest with two types of efforts. Contrary to the classical models of contest, where each player chooses a unique effort, and where the outcome depends on the efforts of all the players, contestants are allowed to reduce the effort of the opponent. Defence increases one's chance of winning while attack annihilates the defence of the opponent. This model has many applications like political campaigning, wars, competition among lobbies, job promotion competitions, or sport contests. We study the general model of contest with attacks and defence and propose an application to negative political campaigns, where two candidates arbitrate between disparaging their opponent or enhancing their own image. We propose sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a symmetric Nash equilibrium of the contest game. In the application, we contribute to the empirically debated question dealing with the effect of attack on voters turnout, and show that the conclusion depends on the distribution of voters sensitivity to defence and attack. Furthermore, contrary to the literature, we show that an underdog candidate may be less aggressive than his opponent. Terms of use: Documents in

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A Spot Check: Casting Doubt on the Demobilizing Effect of Attack Advertising

Cited by 257 publications

References 15 publications

What's Good for the Goose is Bad for the Gander: Negative Political Advertising, Partisanship, and Turnout

What's Good for the Goose is Bad for the Gander: Negative Political Advertising, Partisanship, and Turnout

Negative Campaigning, Fundraising, and Voter Turnout: A Field Experiment

Contest with Attack and Defence: Does Negative Campaigning Increase or Decrease Voters' Turnout?

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