Preliminary Research on Negative Ads

One of the first criticisms of negative attack advertising in political campaigns was that the notion that a negative attack ad would discourage the electorate from participating in the election.  The essential idea was that after seeing negative ads the voter would become turned off to the election process and thus not vote.  In 1998 and 1999 a group of political scientists went out to test that very theory.

As part of my literature review I explored their studies, here is an excerpt from that review:

One of the criticisms of negative campaign ads is that they discourage the electorate from voting and in some cases, discourage voters from participating in any kind of politics.  This critique was explored in the late 1990’s by a group of political scientists who eventually concluded, “Exposure to negative advertising creates an ‘avoidance’ set among viewers, which leaves them disengaged from the candidates and the political process,” (Houston and Roskos-Ewoldsen 1998; Houston, Doan, and Roskos-Ewoldsen 1999 cited in Ansolabehere, SIyengar and Simon, 1999).  That finding was further reinforced by the Ansolabehere et.al. study that found “the experimental, survey, and aggregate data converge on the same conclusion: Negative advertising demobilizes voters,” (Ansolabehere, SIyengar and Simon, 1999).

Based on my initial research, it would appear that negative ads do indeed demobilize voters, and would thus cost a candidate votes in an upcoming election.  If this is the case why would politicians, who spend millions of dollars on campaign advertising, promote and disseminate these negative ads among their voter base?  Perhaps there is much more to this story than what the initial research shows.

In my next post, we’ll be looking at more current research on negative advertising to see if it is consistent with the studies from the late 90’s.

References

Ansolabehere, Stephen D., Shanto Iyengar and Adam Simon.  1999.  “Replicating Experiments Using Aggregate and Survey Data: The Case of Negative Advertising and Turnout,” The American Political Science Review vol. 93, no. 4: 901-909.

Houston, D. A., and D. R. Roskos-Ewoldsen.  1998.  "Cancellation and Focus Model of Choice and Preferences for Political Candidates," Basic and Applied Social Psychology vol. 20: 305- 12.

Houston, D. A., K. A. Doan, and D. R. Roskos-Ewoldsen.  1999.  "Negative Political Advertising and Choice Conflict," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied vol. 5, no. 1: 3-16.

Summers, Matthew.  2012.  "Literature Review"