The Influence of Tone, Target, and Issue Ownership on Political Advertising Effects in Primary Versus General Elections

Meirick, Patrick C.; Nisbett, Gwendelyn S.; Jefferson, Matthew D.; Pfau, Michael

doi:10.1080/15377857.2011.588111

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Recent work shows that positive ads also influence viewers' motivation to vote for a specific candidate or party (e.g., Seibt et al, 2019). While boundary conditions exist for the motivational effect of positive ads, too (e.g., Meirick et al, 2011), these results challenges the view that negative ads are more effective (Jasperson and Fan, 2002;Stevens, 2012). Research suggests that the most effective political campaigns make use of both types of political ads (Devlin, 1995).…”

Section: Research On Political Advertisementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Campaigning in Politics: Being Moved and Anger in Political Ads Motivate to Support Candidate and Party

Grüning

Schubert

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Political advertising to recruit the support of voters is an inherent part of politics. Today, ads are distributed via television and online, including social media. This type of advertisement attempts to recruit support by presenting convincing arguments and evoking various emotions about the candidate, opponents, and policy proposals. We discuss recent arguments and evidence that a specific social emotion, namely the concept kama muta, plays a role in political advertisements. In vernacular language, kama muta is typically labeled as being moved or touched. We compare kama muta and anger theoretically and discuss how they can influence voters’ willingness to support a candidate. We then, for the first time, compare kama muta and anger empirically in the same study. Specifically, we showed American participants short political ads during the 2018 United States midterm election campaigns. All participants saw both kama muta- and anger-evoking ads from both Democratic or Republican candidates. In total, everybody watched eight ads. We assessed participants’ degree of being moved and angered by the videos and their motivation for three types of political support: ideational, financial, and personal. The emotional impact of an ad depended on its perceived source: Participants felt especially angry after watching the anger-evoking ads and especially moved by moving ads if they identified with the political party that had produced the video. Both emotions mediated were associated with increased intentions to provide support. Importantly, if one of the two emotions was evoked, its effect on political support was enhanced if participants identified with the party that had produced the ad. We discuss limitations of the method and implications of the results for future research and practice.

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Section: Research On Political Advertisementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Campaigning in Politics: Being Moved and Anger in Political Ads Motivate to Support Candidate and Party

Grüning

Schubert

2022

Front. Psychol.

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“…Negative advertisements have been demonstrated to increase voters' confidence in their knowledge of candidates' issue positions (Koch, 2008). Although voters generally regard talking about an opponent's ideology and political positions as fair game in campaigns (Mattes & Redlawsk, 2014), "going negative" can cost candidates support if they outpace their opponents in negativity (Banda & Windett, 2016), especially during primary campaigns (Meirick et al, 2011). Still, candidates do engage in negative campaigning, often using outside groups as intermediaries to insulate themselves from blowback from particularly harsh criticism of their opponents (Dowling & Wichowsky, 2015).…”

Section: Ideology In Polarized Timesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Ideological Attacks Change How Voters Evaluate Primary Election Candidates?

Britzman

Kantack

2022

American Politics Research

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Partisan polarization in the United States has increased the ideological uniformity of the Democratic and Republican parties, and therefore the usefulness of party identification as an indicator of candidates’ ideology. However, candidates – especially during primary elections – often attack their opponents for being insufficiently conservative or progressive, explicitly signaling to voters that they should put less faith in their stereotypes about the party’s ideology when evaluating candidates. To assess the effects of these ideological attacks, we conduct a Dynamic Process Tracing Environment experiment that simulates a primary election campaign. We find mixed evidence that participants, when exposed to an ideological attack ad, lower their ratings of the attacked candidate’s ideological extremity, overall favorability, qualification for office, and trustworthiness. However, we observe no differences between experimental conditions in terms of information search, suggesting that ideological attacks are generally accepted at face value and not independently verified by voters.

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Neoliberalism and the Production of Enemies: The Commercial Logic of Yahoo! News

Bingham

Kramer

2015

Neoliberalism, Economic Radicalism, and the Normalization of Violence

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The Influence of Tone, Target, and Issue Ownership on Political Advertising Effects in Primary Versus General Elections

Cited by 7 publications

References 54 publications

Emotional Campaigning in Politics: Being Moved and Anger in Political Ads Motivate to Support Candidate and Party

Emotional Campaigning in Politics: Being Moved and Anger in Political Ads Motivate to Support Candidate and Party

Do Ideological Attacks Change How Voters Evaluate Primary Election Candidates?

Neoliberalism and the Production of Enemies: The Commercial Logic of Yahoo! News

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