Prelim Research Was Way Off

As with most research, just when you think you have reached your conclusion, you find something else that completely throws you in another direction.  In my last post I explored research that argued negative advertising demobilizes the electorate and discourages people from participating in politics.  As I dug a little deeper, I found a multitude of more recent studies that not only refuted the methodology and conclusions from those earlier studies, but in fact argued the complete opposite: negative ads actually mobilize the electorate, encouraging participation.

I summed up my findings in my literature review, below is another excerpt:

In 1999 Wattenberg and Brians replicated the experiments used by those earlier studies and found “that their aggregate study is deeply flawed and that Ansolabehere et al. exaggerated the demobilization dangers posed by attack advertising, at least in voters' own context,” (Wattenberg and Brians, 1999).  The Wattenberg study went even further, arguing that by making the choice between the candidates seem like an important one to the voter, negative ads actually motivate the voter to participate in the election (Wattenberg and Brians, 1999).  Wattenberg and Brians were some of the first to challenge the popular position that negative ads discourage voter participation, but their findings were confirmed by a later study performed by Goldstein and Freedman in 2002 who argue “by engaging voters, by raising interest, and by communicating the notion that something important is at stake in the outcome of an election, negative ads… should be more likely to stimulate than depress voter turnout,” (Goldstein and Freedman, 2002).

While I concede that this may not be the end of the story, it does seem that the recent studies of negative advertising overwhelmingly point to an increase in voter participation as a direct effect of negative ads.  Satisfied with that conclusion, I will now move to the "how" aspect of negative advertising.  If it does indeed encourage voter participation, how does it accomplish that?  Are negative ads more or less effective in encouraging participation than positive ones?  Look for the answers to these questions in my next blog.

References

Goldstein, Ken and Paul Freedman.  2002.  “Campaign Advertising and Voter Turnout: New Evidence for a Stimulation Effect,” The Journal of Politics vol. 64, no. 3: 721-740.

Summers, Matthew.  2012.  “Literature Review.”

Wattenberg, Martin P. and Craig Leonard Brians. 1999.  “Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer of Mobilizer?”  The American Political Science Review vol. 93, no. 4: 891-899.