Effects of Issue‐Specific Political Advertisements in the 2015 Parliamentary Elections of Switzerland

Abstract

Our paper captures the influence of political advertisements on vote intentions in the framework of the 2015 parliamentary elections. We focus on the two winning parties, the FDP and SVP, and the promotion of their stances on immigration/asylum, relations to the EU and the economy. We make use of an extensive database on political advertisements collected in 50 important national and regional newspapers that we link to the Selects respondents. Our findings only hint at limited effects of issue-specific advertisements with regard to the activation of latent preferences, suggesting that campaigns mattered more when they have managed to make a party's issue positions known to the electorate. The general reinforcement tendencies detected for migration ads of the SVP suggest that reinforcement effects might be particularly prone when highly contentious issues are at stake. Our results indicate that the SVP did not manage to mobilize new voters with their political advertisements.

Paying for ads or getting into the news? How parties persuade citizens of their issue competence during an election campaign

“…Similarly, the current results are in line with Tresch and Feddersen’s (2019) findings that media coverage tended to stabilize competence perceptions. The results also support evidence brought by Zumofen and Gerber (2018) . Advertisements during the campaign could “boost” the competence perceptions of a party, although they found rather small effects, which may be due to differences in the design.…”

“…Using RCS panel data on the 2015 Swiss elections, Tresch and Feddersen (2019) found that competence perceptions are more unstable and sensitive to media coverage than the associative dimension. Relying on the same data as the previous authors, Zumofen and Gerber (2018) studied the effects of issue-specific advertisements on voting intentions and competence perceptions. They showed that advertisements during the campaign could “boost” the competence perceptions of a party, even though the effects were rather small.…”

“…However, they do not offer insight into the effectiveness of differing party strategies (except Walgrave and De Swert (2007) at the aggregate level). For instance, Tresch and Feddersen (2019) and Zumofen and Gerber (2018) studied perceptions of competence during the same election and provided evidence that both news and advertisements mattered. However, the focus of each paper was on a single communication channel and therefore prevented differentiating the effects.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue “The 2015 Swiss National Elections”

“…Other contributions link the Selects data with external data sources. To study the impact of the election campaign on vote intentions, Zumofen and Gerber ( 2018 ) make use of an additional dataset on political advertisements collected by the Année Politique Suisse (APS) at the University of Bern and link it to the panel/rolling cross‐section survey. Lutz et al.…”