POLITICAL ADVERTISING

POLITICAL ADVERTISING

One of the major political issues of our time is the rapidly escalating costs required to run for office, in large part due to the increased purchase of television time and hiring of media consultants. In the 1996 U.S. Presidential election, incumbent Bill Clinton spent $98.4 million on television advertising, while opponent Robert Dole spent $78.2 million! (Devlin, 1997). In the 2000 election, candidates spent almost two billion dollars on

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TV advertising, almost two-thirds of the total campaign finance dollars (Steyer, 2002). Although the arguments of the campaign finance reform debate are outside the scope of this book, we want to examine the purposes and effects of political advertising, whose aim is to affect the perceived reality of that candidate in our minds.

Purposes Name Recognition. What are the purposes of political advertising? A

primary one for lesser-known candidates and those campaigning outside of their previous constituency (e.g., a senator or governor running for president) is simply awareness and recognition of their name. Voters must have heard of a candidate before they can be expected to have any image of or attitude about that candidate. Name recognition is the perennial problem of “dark horse” challenger candidates for any office. In this sense, the goal of political advertising is not unlike the goal for advertising a new product on the market.

Agenda Setting. Political advertising also sets the agenda on issues by conveying to us what issues we should feel are particularly important (Schleuder, McCombs, & Wanta, 1991). Obviously a candidate will try to highlight those issues where he or she is strongest. For example, an incumbent president with several foreign policy successes but economic problems at home is going to try to position foreign policy as a major issue in the campaign, whereas the opposing candidate may try to set the agenda toward domestic issues. Sometimes such decisions are not so clear-cut. For example, Democrats in 1980 had to decide whether to make age an issue in regard to Republican Ronald Reagan, who would be the oldest president ever elected. On the one hand, they stood to gain if voters became concerned that

69 was too old to begin the job. On the other hand, they stood to lose if voters perceived them to be too mean spirited and unfairly attacking a nice older gentleman fully capable of competently functioning in office. For better or worse, Democrats chose not to make age an issue, a strategy adhered to in 1984 against a then 73-year-old Reagan. For the same reason, 50-year-old Bill Clinton did not make challenger Bob Dole’s 72 years an issue in 1996.

Schleuder et al. (1991) argued for a spreading activation memory model (e.g., Collins & Loftus, 1975) of agenda setting. For example, if a person is primed by exposure to a prior story about the economy, associations from that initial concept will travel in one’s memory to activate related information on that topic to a more conscious level than other information.

Thus, the agenda is set that this issue is important when it comes to processing later information such as a political ad. In this model, either a

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prior ad or a news story could serve a priming function and set the agenda for interpreting a subsequent ad. Thus, a candidate must be concerned about an ad appearing immediately following a news story that inadvertently sets a different agenda, For example, a candidate weak on economic issues would not want his or her ad to follow a news story about gloomy economic indicators.

Image Building. Political advertising also seeks to convey an image of a candidate, or perhaps reinforce, soften, or redefine an existing image. This construction of an image is done especially effectively by television, which communicates nonverbal as well as verbal behaviors. One effective way to communicate an image is through eliciting emotional responses in the viewer (Englis, 1994). The widespread use of media consultants testifies to the importance of image. Polls are taken by a candidate’s campaign staff to determine what issues voters are concerned about and what aspects of their own and the opponent’s campaigns attract or trouble them. Then the candidate’s image is tailored accordingly.

Some studies of candidate image have focused on general affective traits or personality or social attributes and compared the image a voter has with actual voting behavior (Anderson & Kibler, 1978; Nimmo & Savage, 1976). More situational approaches have demonstrated a relationship between voters’ ratings of candidate behaviors and voting preference (Husson, Stephen, Harrison, & Fehr, 1988). Another approach has been to study how voters use their cognitive schemas (see Chapter 2) to form an image of a candidate, which subsequently affects their evaluation (Garramone, Steele, & Pinkleton, 1991). Lau (1986) argued that there are four general schemas that people use to process political information: candidate personality factors, issues, group relations, and party identification. Many voters fairly consistently use one of these schemas more than the others.

There are limits, of course, to what a media campaign can do; an urban candidate may never look comfortable and convincing astride a horse making a political ad for the rural West. Also, one cannot assume that all voters will understand an ad in the same way. The image that different members of the public construct in response to the same ads may be strikingly different because of their unique experiences and political predilections. What one viewer sees as a sincere interest in common people looks to another as incredible hokeyness and opportunism.

Issue Exposition. Occasionally, ads develop a candidate’s position on issues. Such ads are most conducive to print media, particularly direct mail ads, but there is the high probability that a large majority of voters will not read such material. Of course, due to the mass nature of media communication, even a minuscule percentage of the population reading a

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newspaper ad might be considered a success for the candidate. If the appeal is simple, even a TV spot can effectively communicate a candidate’s position, perhaps even more successfully than a televised debate (Just, Crigler, & Wallach, 1990).

Fund Raising. Finally, ads may be used to raise money, Ross Perot included toll-free phone numbers for contributions in his advertising during his 1992 and 1996 third-party campaigns for the U.S. Presidency. Such ads, which are a major expense, may also directly attract money to meet those expenses. Of course, they also do so indirectly by keeping the candidate’s name in the public consciousness, a prerequisite for any successful fundraising.

Appeals in Political Advertising

Political ads use most of the same types of appeals’ as discussed in chapter 4 on advertising. Psychological appeals are very common. Basic appeals to security come out both in the “strong national defense” and “law and order” appeals. Fear appeals can be especially powerful in political advertising. For example, in George H.W. Bush’s infamous “Willie Horton” ad of the 1988 presidential campaign, viewers were encouraged to fear that Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis would let dangerous criminals go free, citing the example of Massachusetts felon Willie Horton, who had been released on parole and then committed murder. The fact that Horton was an African- American subtly played to White fears about Black crime and may have reinforced racist stereotypes of African-American men. Fear appeals, in general, are most often used by incumbents, playing on voters’ fear of the unknown quality of what the challenger’s work in office would be like.

Patriotic appeals are of course especially common in political advertising, with certain symbols like the American flag very commonly present, even for state and local races. Certain other patriotic symbols like familiar public buildings in Washington, D.C. the Statue of Liberty, and national historical symbols are widely used.

Family and affiliation appeals are seen in the typical family campaign ad photo of a candidate with smiling supportive spouse and children, as if being married or a parent somehow qualified one to hold public office. It is interesting and ironic that an occupation virtually guaranteed to take enormous amounts of time away from family is so heavily “sold” with such family appeals. Using only pure logic, one might argue that an appeal from an unmarried, childless candidate who could say, “I have no family responsibilities; I’ll spend all my time in office working for you” would be the most successful. However, such an appeal would probably be a dismal failure.

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Testimonials are often used, sometimes by famous endorsers such as a senator or president plugging for the local candidate, or by the man or woman in the street saying how much they trust a candidate to look after their interests in Washington. A popular president or other office holder of one’s party is eagerly sought for testimonial purposes; an unpopular one may

be an embarrassing liability for their party’s candidates for other offices.

Negative Advertising

The issue of how stridently and directly to attack the opponent in advertising is a major question that all political campaigns must deal with. Attacks on the opposition may be highly effective if they are perceived as fair. Regardless of their factual merit, or lack of it, if they are perceived as mean- spirited “cheap shots,” they can disastrously boomerang against the candidate (Garramone, 1984, 1985; Merritt, 1984). Fear of such a scenario sends shivers up the spines of all politicians and often causes them to not take chances in this area, as seen in the Democrats’ decision not to make Ronald Reagan’s or Bob Dole’s age issues.

It is not clear how much negative advertising has increased. By some counts (Kaid & Johnston, 1991), negative advertising increased in the 1980s over the 1970s to about one third of the TV ads in the presidential campaigns. Others, such as the Campaign Discourse Mapping Project (Jamieson & Waldman, 1997), conclude that attack ads have been roughly constant in percentage since 1960. Others argue that the outrage at negative advertising that was common in an earlier era has become much more muted since about 1988, as voters apparently have accepted some degree of mudslinging and even falsifying the opponent’s record as normal (Jamieson, 1992). Still others argue that it is not even conceptually clear what a negative political ad is (Richardson, 2001).

Attacks may be strong without being direct or even mentioning the opponent by name. For example, in 1964 incumbent President Lyndon Johnson ran a TV ad (shortly afterward withdrawn due to complaints) showing a little girl in a field of daisies. Suddenly an atomic bomb explodes and we hear Johnson’s voiceover: “These are the stakes: to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or go into the dark” (Devlin, 1987). Republican candidate Barry Goldwater was never mentioned, but the ad clearly played on viewers’ fears of his hawkishness.

Does negative advertising work? The answer seems to be yes and no. Research suggests that negative ads are remembered well, even if they are not necessarily well-liked (Faber, 1992; Garramone, 1984; Garramone, Atkin, Pinkleton, & Cole, 1990; Johnson-Cartee & Copeland, 1991). For example, in a study of responses to TV commercials used in the 1988 Bush- Dukakis presidential campaign, Newhagen and Reeves (1991) found that

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people judged negative ads more unfavorably than positive ads, yet they remembered them better. Such a finding is quite consistent with the widespread negative attitudes about negative political advertising and the perception that such ads apparently work (Kaid & Boydston, 1987). Negative emotional ads are remembered better than positive emotional ads, perhaps due to their greater use of automatic, as opposed to controlled, cognitive processing (Lang, 1991,2000) and peripheral rather than central processing (Petty, et al., 2002). There is also evidence that negative ads engender cynical attitudes (Schenk-Hamlin, Procter, & Rumsey, 2000). It may also be important whether the negative message is embedded in a positive or negative context. Messages that contrast with their context are recalled better (Basil, Schooler, & Reeves, 1991).

Whether negative ads affect voting behavior is less clear (Faber, 1992). It may matter what the source of the negative message is, whether the focus is issue- or person-oriented, what point in the campaign they are used, and what sort of response is made to the negative attack. In a study of effects of ads in the 1996 Presidential general election campaign, Kaid (1997) concluded that negative ads did affect the voters’ image of the candidate in intended ways, and that this in turn affected voting behavior. In a study of a U.S. Senate race, Lemert, Wanta, and Lee (1999) found that attack ads by a Republican candidate, coupled by a pledge from the Democrat not to use negative advertising, led to a lower voting rate by Republicans but not Democrats. Negative ads, in the framework of comparing the two candidates directly, maybe the most effective way to produce attack advertising. One study showed such comparative negative ads reduced preference for the targeted candidate without much backlash against the sponsoring candidate (Pinkleton, 1998).

Effects of Political Advertising

The effects of political ads, as well as other forms of political commu- nication in media, can be of several sorts (Biocca, 1991; Chaffee & Choe, 1980). The study of such effects has come from the perspectives of political science, political advertising, social psychology, and communication.

In spite of the perception that the overriding intent of political ads would appear to be to cause attitude change in people, relatively few political ads actually change anyone’s mind, in the sense of causing them to switch loyalties from one candidate to another (Blumler & McQuail, 1969; Cornstock et al., 1978; Cwalina, Falkowski, & Kaid, 2000). This is not to say that they are ineffective, however. They frequently help crystallize existing attitudes by sharpening and elaborating them. For example, perhaps someone was slightly leaning toward Al Gore for president in 2000 because of his leadership as vice-president under Bill Clinton. Political advertising

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about his positions, past performance in office, and general intangible impressions about the candidate. In a related vein, political advertising may reinforce existing attitudes in voters to ‘keep in the fold’ a voter who is leaning toward a candidate but not strongly committed. Such an attitude that is reinforced is more likely to translate into voting on Election Day and greater resistance to an opposing candidate’s attempts to change that attitude. Political strategists are always concerned about reinforcing “soft” support from voters who are leaning toward their candidate but not strongly committed. Many ads are targeted at such people.

Sometimes political advertising may actually convert a voter from one candidate to the other, but this is quite rare and did not increase substantially with the advent of television (Boiney & Paletz, 1991; Comstock et al, 1978; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1948; Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954, for pre-TV studies). Of course, because many elections are decided by

a tiny fraction of the vote, such swing votes are not unimportant.

Reactions to political advertising may depend on the bond that the voter feels with the candidate (Alwitt, Deighton, & Grimm, 1991). Such an attitudinal bond may be based on an objective belief (“I like his program for the economy”) or a subjective emotion (“I feel good about him”) criterion. Sometimes the two may be opposed, as in the case where there is objective bonding in terms of agreement with the candidate’s positions on issues but passionate opposition on more emotional levels. Also, an image-oriented ad may have a different impact than an issue-oriented ad. For example, Geiger and Reeves (1991) found that candidates were evaluated more favorably after issue ads than image ads, but visual memory for the candidate was better following an image ad. See Faber (1992), Jamieson (1992), Johnson- Cartee and Copeland (1997), and Kaid and Holtz-Bacha (1995) for reviews of political advertising and its effects.