Political Advertising Online and Offline

Abstract

Despite the rapid growth of online political advertising, the vast majority of scholarship on political advertising relies exclusively on evidence from candidates’ television advertisements. The relatively low cost of creating and deploying online advertisements and the ability to target online advertisements more precisely may broaden the set of candidates who advertise and allow candidates to craft messages to more narrow audiences than on television. Drawing on data from the newly released Facebook Ad Library API and television data from the Wesleyan Media Project, we find that a much broader set of candidates advertises on Facebook than television, particularly in down-ballot races. We then examine within-candidate variation in the strategic use and content of advertising on television relative to Facebook for all federal, statewide, and state legislative candidates in the 2018 election. Among candidates who use both advertising media, Facebook advertising occurs earlier in the campaign, is less negative, less issue focused, and more partisan than television advertising.

FBAdLibrarian and Pykognition: open science tools for the collection and emotion detection of images in Facebook political ads with computer vision

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Measuring Executive Ideology and its Influence

“…Because contributors often donate to candidates in different districts or at different levels of government, these scores theoretically place politicians across a variety of offices on the same ideological scale. Already, scholars have used CFscores in the gubernatorial context to explain how governors advertise themselves during elections (Fowler et al 2019) and fill legislative vacancies (Cooper et al 2018).…”

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