Knowledgeable Voters Make Quality Voters

Another argument I wanted to address regarding campaign advertising in general is their informational content (or lack thereof).  Some critics believe that campaign ads are character attack driven, rather than issue driven, thus leaving the electorate with little or no informational value regarding core problems in the United States.  I admit, I too have felt that way sometimes when seeing a political ad that seems to focus only on negative issues that are personal in nature.  I did, however, find conflicting results in the relevant literature.

I have since finished my research paper, but wanted to update my bloggers as to my results.  Below is an excerpt from that paper regarding a study done in 2004 focusing on the informational content of campaign ads.  The study was done by Freedman, Franz and Goldstein, and they

argue that over the last several decades, television campaign advertising has subsidized the informational needs of the American citizenry.  In their conclusion, Freedman et. al. argued convincingly that “exposure to campaign advertising produces citizens who are more interested in the election, have more to say about the candidates, are more familiar with who is running, and ultimately, are more likely to vote” (Freedman, Franz and Goldstein 2004).  Additionally, their study found that the impact of the campaign ads had the greatest effect on those who had the least amount of initial information (Summers 2012).

The last sentence of that excerpt is of particular interest.  In order for an electoral process to be of high democratic quality, the citizenry who vote must be well-informed on the issues at hand and the qualities of the candidates.  If campaign ads only stimulated voter turnout, but didn’t increase the knowledge level of those voters, the quality of our democracy would be at risk.  Since that study found that campaign ads do indeed increase voter knowledge, it can be concluded that they are beneficial to the electoral process and our democracy as a whole.

References

Freedman, Paul, Michael Franz and Kenneth Goldstein.  2004.  “Campaign Advertising and Democratic Citizenship,” American journal of Political Science vol. 48, no. 4: 723-741.

Summers, Matthew.  2012.  “Campaign Advertising: The Downfall of Democracy?”