Identifying the Persuasive Effects of Presidential Advertising

Huber, Gregory A.; Arceneaux, Kevin

doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00291.x

Cited by 252 publications

(200 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…To be sure, the evidence strongly suggests that mass communications can sometimes influence individuals in the short term, even in sufficient numbers to swing very close elections (e.g., Hill et al 2012). Indeed, our findings may seem surprising in light of other field experiments that have found sizeable short-term effects of mass communication on candidate choice in both low-salience (Panagopoulos and Green 2008;Gerber et al 2011b) and high-salience elections (Huber and Arceneaux 2007;Gerber et al 2011a). 27 However, a rich research tradition also raises doubts about the ability of mass messages to leave more than a fleeting impression on the public (e.g., Campbell et al 1960;Klapper 1960), even when sympathetic subjects are directly exposed to persuasive content (e.g., Hovland et al 1949).…”

Section: Theoretical Implications For Mass Communicationcontrasting

confidence: 50%

Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments

2013

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Internet advertisements are an increasingly common form of mass communication and present fresh opportunities for understanding enduring questions about political persuasion. However, the effects of online ads on electoral choice have received little scholarly attention. We develop a new field experimental approach for assessing the effects of online advertisements and deploy it in two studies. In each study, candidates for legislative office targeted randomly selected segments of their constituencies for a high volume of Facebook advertising. Recall of the ads, candidate name recognition, and candidate evaluations were measured with ostensibly unrelated telephone surveys after weeklong advertising campaigns. Voters randomly exposed to the ads were in some cases more likely to recall them but no more likely to recognize or positively evaluate the candidates they depicted. From a theoretical standpoint, these findings suggest that even frequent exposure to advertising messages may be insufficient to impart new information or change attitudes.

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Section: Theoretical Implications For Mass Communicationcontrasting

confidence: 50%

Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments

2013

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“…As Huber and Arceneaux (2007) have pointed out, the effects of ground campaigns are collinear with advertising and may lead to inflated estimates of advertising effects. Their solution is to estimate effects in non-battleground states in which ground campaigns do not occur.…”

Section: The Response Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In one study, Johnston, Hagen, and Jamieson (2004) aggregate advertisements by blocks as short as five days, a procedure that implies, but does not prove, substantial decay of effects. But in another study, Huber and Arceneaux (2007) aggregate advertisements over a 30-day period, and in still another, Franz and Ridout (2010) aggregate ads in blocks of one, two, and multiple months. The Texas advertising study aggregates data by the week and finds no evidence that any effects survive from one week into the next.…”

Section: Field Studies Of Political Persuasionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication

Hill¹,

Lo²,

Vavreck³

et al. 2013

Political Communication

191

109

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Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential election and 2006 sub-national elections, but argue that our model and results are broadly applicable within the field of political communication. We find that the bulk of the persuasive impact of advertising decays quickly, but that some effect in the presidential campaign endures for at least six weeks. These results, which are similar in rolling cross-section survey data and county-level data on actual presidential vote, appear to reflect a mix of memory-based processing (whose effects last only as long as short-term memory lasts) and on-line processing (whose effects are more durable). Finally, we find that immediate effects of advertising are larger in sub-national than presidential elections, but decay more quickly and more completely.2 Joseph Klapper's classic argument that exposure to mass communication rarely causes significant opinion change is no longer persuasive to many scholars (Klapper, 1960). In the laboratory and in the field, multiple studies have demonstrated fairly large and seemingly consequential effects of exposure to mass communication. 1 A handful of recent studies, however, has found that persuasion effects can be quite shortlived, decaying in a few weeks or even a few days. Best known is the Texas advertising study, which found no persistence of persuasion effects in the week following exposure to the ads (Gerber, Gimpel, Green, and Shaw, 2011). But other recent studies show similar results. For example, Mutz and Reeves (2005) found that exposure to "uncivil behavior" on TV talk shows reduced the public's level of political trust, but that trust bounced back to baseline levels in a follow-up survey.Social psychologists have grappled for decades with findings that persuasive communication often produces only short-lived effects (Cook and Flay, 1978;Petty and Wegener, 1998 raised, much less investigated, are the focus of this paper. We answer them with evidence on the effects of political advertising, but our analysis is framed in terms generally applicable within the field of mass political communication.The paper begins with the theoretical observation that, in politics as in the rest of life, citizens 1 For reviews, see Iyengar and Simon, 2000; Kinder 2003. 3 form opinions by one of two routes (Hastie and Park, 1986). In the first, memory-based evaluation, people express opinions on the basis of information available in memory when asked. In this model, the effect of persuasive messages is to create opinions that may persist only as long as the messages underlying them remain accessible in memory, which may not be long. In the...

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“…al (2011), Huber andArceneaux (2007), Krasno and Green (2008) and Posner (2004)). These studies exploit the general fact that laws, regulations, political parties and advertisement campaigns are strongly influenced by geographical borders.…”

Section: Empirical Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating the Impacts of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in Peru: A Geographical Regression Discontinuity Approach

Salazar

Maffioli²,

Aramburu³

et al. 2016

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work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license. AbstractIn this paper, we evaluate the short term impact of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in the coastal areas of Peru. Exploiting arbitrary variation in the program's intervention borders, as well as precise geographic location data of farmer's households, we use a Geographical Regression Discontinuity (GRD) approach to identify the program's effects on agricultural outcomes. For this purpose, baseline and follow up surveys were collected for 615 households -307 treated and 308 controls-. Baseline data shows that producer and farm-level characteristics in treated and control areas are balanced. This confirms that the program's intervention borders were set only as a function of financial and logistic restrictions and independently of the pest incidence levels and/or other producer and/or farm characteristics. The results show that farmers in treated areas improved pest knowledge and are more likely to implement best practices for plague prevention and control. Beneficiary farmers also present increased fruit crops productivity and sales. The robustness of these findings is confirmed using placebo tests.

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Identifying the Persuasive Effects of Presidential Advertising

Cited by 252 publications

References 26 publications

Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments

Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments

How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication

Estimating the Impacts of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in Peru: A Geographical Regression Discontinuity Approach

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