Partisan self-interest is an important driver for people’s support for the regulation of targeted political advertising

Abstract

The rapid emergence of online targeted political advertising has raised concerns over data privacy and what the government’s response should be. This paper tested and confirmed the hypothesis that public attitudes toward stricter regulation of online targeted political advertising are partially motivated by partisan self-interest. We conducted an experiment using an online survey of 1549 Americans who identify as either Democrats or Republicans. Our findings show that Democrats and Republicans believe that online targeted political advertising benefits the opposing party. This belief is based on their conviction that their political opponents are more likely to be mobilized by online targeted political advertising than are supporters of their own party. We exogenously manipulated partisan self-interest considerations of a random subset of participants by truthfully informing them that, in the past, online targeted political advertising has benefited Republicans. Our findings show that Republicans informed about this had less favorable attitudes toward regulation than did their uninformed co-partisans. This suggests that Republicans’ attitudes regarding stricter regulation are based not solely on concerns about privacy violations, but also, in part, are caused by beliefs about partisan advantage. The results imply that people are willing to accept violations of their privacy if their preferred party benefits from the use of online targeted political advertising.

What makes online political ads unacceptable? Interrogating public attitudes to inform regulatory responses

“…In particular, our results show that ads from a partisan source that is congruent with a respondent's own partisan views are more likely to be viewed as acceptable (e.g., Conservative voters presented with ads placed by Conservative sources), whilst ads from incongruent partisan sources are more likely to be seen as unacceptable (e.g., Labour supporters presented with ads placed by Conservative sources). Echoing the established academic theory on opinion formation based on partisan motivated reasoning (Bolsen et al, 2014;Taber & Lodge, 2016), our findings reveal that the source of a political ad, in certain situations, has an impact on the perceptions of online political advertising acceptability (see also Baum et al, 2021). Individuals tend to interpret political information in a way that aligns with their partisan interest, but it is important to note that we didn't find consistent evidence of this effect.…”

“…When given party cues (e.g., a piece of information that is sponsored by a political party), individuals are found to rely on heuristic cognitive processing that would urge them to endorse the stance of their party (Petersen et al, 2013). Baum et al, (2021) for example, have shown how partisan cues drive attitude towards political advertising, finding that partisan self-interest plays an important role in predicting people's support for the regulation of targeted political advertising. As such, we expect that the congruence between a respondent's own partisan views and the partisan source of an ad will affect perceived acceptability.…”