The Case against Political AdvertisementsCritiques of political opponents occur in numerous forms, but the negative advertisement has been the means of choice for many candidates in the television era. Ads labeled as negative range from innocuous efforts to contrast the attributes and beliefs of competing candidates to vituperative, inflammatory assaults. At their worst, negative ads hold the potential to denigrate the political process, and to do so while infiltrating the living rooms of television viewers across the nation. Given the distasteful character of the most notorious of negative advertisements, it is reasonable to surmise that exposure to such ads will lead citizens to think less not only of the candidates in a given election, but also of politics and government more broadly. Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) argue this point forcefully: «In recent years, the political pulsetakers have registered record lows in political participation, record highs in public cynicism and alienation, and record rates of disapproval of the House of Representatives, the institution designed to represent the public will. The single biggest cause of the new, ugly regime is the proliferation of negative political advertising on tv.» Later, Ansolabehere and Iyengar explain the mechanism that leads from exposure to negative ads to cynicism and disapproval: “people infer from negative advertisements that the entire process, not just the targeted candidate, is deeply flawed.” Ansolabehere and Iyengar are not alone in arguing that negative ads damage mass attitudes. For example, two reports published a few years prior to the Ansolabehere and Iyengar studies alleged that negative ads generate such effects (Buchanan 1991; Dionne 1991). Buchanan suggested that attack ads may lead to citizen “disenchantment with the larger political process” and that the attack campaign “breeds public cynicism.” West (2005) and Diamond and Bates (1992), although themselves skeptical regarding some of the claimed harmful effects of negative ads, noted that the belief that such effects do occur is widely held. West wrote, for example, that “attack ads are viewed by many people as the electronic equivalent of the plague.” The charge leveled against negative ads seems plausible. Although numerous scholars have suggested that negative ads may mobilize, rather than demobilize, the electorate, it is far more difficult to envision that such ads would instill the public with optimism and political confidence. Negative ads may be informative, they may point out legitimate concerns about opposing candidates, and they may signal the importance of a particular election, yet none of these leads in any obvious manner to a citizenry with a collectively rosier outlook on politics. Although scenarios can be devised whereby negative ads have either negative, null, or positive effects on voter turnout, only effects of the first two forms seem likely when the question under consideration is whether negative ads influence citizens’ broader political perceptions. The analytical case developed by Ansolabehere and Iyengar is, in our judgment, persuasive, but the empirical case is incomplete. Ansolabehere and Iyengar offer provocative evidence consistent with the claimed effects of negative ads on mass attitudes, but the evidence is, for several reasons, less than definitive. Three specific matters warrant discussion. First, although Ansolabehere and Iyengar issue a sweeping indictment of negative ads, their analyses center on only two variables: internal and external political efficacy. External efficacy encompasses several important considerations regarding the quality and responsiveness of elected officials, and thus it is a reasonable dependent variable for the task at hand. The relevance of internal efficacy is less certain in that the rationale for why negative ads should lead citizens to doubt their own levels of political aptitude is questionable. Ultimately, though, what concerns us is that there were not additional measures that tapped other aspects of public opinion. Ansolabehere and Iyengar find that exposure to negative ads decreases internal and external efficacy, but it is possible that such ads exert stronger or weaker effects on other important dimensions of mass opinion. Second, the authors derive their results using a single methodological approach: the laboratory experiment. We agree with Ansolabehere and Iyengar on the virtues of experiments for causal analysis, but external corroboration of laboratory findings is desirable. This is especially important in the present case because Ansolabehere and Iyengar offer conclusions regarding the corrosive effects of negative ads on U.S. national opinion, even though they present no evidence from outside the laboratory. In contemplating research that does speak to national opinion, it is uncertain how the results will stack up relative to those from the laboratory. The laboratory is much less noisy than the real world, and thus it is possible that an examination of survey data would mute the finding of an advertisement-efficacy link. Sigelman and Kugler (2003) note, for instance, that citizens in the same states differed dramatically from one another in how negative they perceived a statewide campaign to be. If voters in actual elections do not recognize negative campaigns (or perceive negativity when it is absent), then the real-world link between ad tone and mass attitudes may be tenuous. On the other hand, even elaborate experiments cannot capture the tremendous variance in campaign behavior found across the hundreds of electoral contests in a year such as 2002. If ad tone matters for citizens’ attitudes, then perhaps the strongest evidence will be found in research that differentiates voters who were bombarded with hundreds, and even thousands, of negative ads from voters who viewed only positive ads, and from voters who were exposed to no campaign ads at all. Third, although Ansolabehere and Iyengar find that exposure to negative ads influences internal and external efficacy, the effects appear moderate in both substantive importance and statistical significance. In their model of external efficacy, a model with 2,216 observations, the ad tone variable produces only a modestly significant effect, and gender, race, and partisanship all generate substantive effects of more than twice the magnitude of the effect for ad tone. Ad tone brings a larger substantive effect on internal efficacy, but this effect is dwarfed by that of political interest. Also, in a model with 790 observations, the coefficient for ad tone only narrowly achieves statistical significance as a predictor of internal efficacy. Hence the empirical results do not support the charge that negative ads are the “single biggest cause” of damage to mass attitudes. Many researchers have explored the systemic effects of negative advertisements since the publication of Ansolabehere and Iyengar’s studies, but the vast majority of this research has reconsidered the relationship between ad tone and turnout. In contrast, reassessment of the impact of negative ads on mass attitudes has been rarer. We suspect that the reason for this is that most analysts have found Ansolabehere and Iyengar’s thesis to be persuasive—perhaps to the point that follow-up research has seemed unnecessary. There appears to be some agreement that exposure to negative ads will darken citizens’ views of politics, and perhaps that it will serve as a demobilizing force; however, many scholars also believe that other effects of negative ads on turnout are positive, offsetting any demobilization brought by dwindling public confidence in the political process. Finkel and Geer (1998) delineate this position clearly: «The notion that exposure to attack advertising may influence the electorate’s sense of external efficacy or feelings of governmental responsiveness is certainly reasonable. Moreover, we agree with Ansolabehere et al. and Ansolabehere and Iyengar that this process could explain why some individuals abstain from voting in a given campaign. However, there are equally compelling reasons why attack advertising may stimulate voter participation.» Thorson et al. (2000) find that exposure to negative campaign ads lowers efficacy and raises political cynicism. Unfortunately, Thorson et al.’s methodological approach raises serious questions regarding their ability to infer that exposure to negative ads causes these effects. Their data are taken from a survey fielded in a single metropolitan area, and they operationalize exposure to negative ads via an item that asked respondents to gauge how many negative ads they had seen in a recent campaign. Measures of ad exposure based on individual recall are problematic both because viewers’ recollections of what they have seen tend to be sketchy and because of the threat of endogeneity. On the latter point, it is possible that the correspondence between self-reported exposure to negative ads and levels of political cynicism merely signifies that political cynicism led some respondents to perceive campaigns as negative, effectively reversing the causal arrow. Exposure to negative ads varies across individuals by three factors: (1) when exposure was measured (e.g., in U.S. elections, the likelihood of exposure to negative ads is greater for a respondent interviewed in late October than for one interviewed in early September); (2) where the respondent lives (because some campaigns have more negative ads than others); and (3) what/how many television programs individuals watch. The first and second of these factors are constant in the Thorson et al. (2000) study because they administered their survey in a single community in a five-day period following the 1994 U.S. elections. As to the third factor, nearly half of ads in subnational elections are aired on local news broadcasts, but Thorson et al. control for local news viewing in their models. Hence there is virtually no opportunity for variance in actual exposure to negative ads to drive variance in self-reported exposure to negative ads. Lau and Pomper (2004) merge data on newspaper coverage of Senate races with data from the National Election Studies (NES) and explore whether campaign tone matters for external efficacy and trust in government. Their full sample models yield no sign that campaign tone produces the hypothesized effects; however, when estimating separate models for partisans and independents, they find a slight relationship for efficacy: “negative campaigning has the hypothesized negative effect on efficacy for respondents who pay a lot of attention to the campaign and live in states where campaign intensity is high”. The authors express doubt as to the importance of this finding because the relationship was found only among a subset of the electorate, the effect was substantively modest (a swing in efficacy of 0.17 points on a variable with a range of 0–4), and the coefficient reached only a marginal level of statistical significance. But Lau and Pomper note that the cumulative effect of negative campaigning on efficacy might be greater. We would add to this that the study’s measure of campaign tone is not specific to negative advertising, and thus that somewhat stronger (or weaker) effects may emerge in analyses focused solely on the possible effects of campaign ads. Brader (2006) tackles many of the dependent variables of interest to us in experimental research on citizen response to ad tone. Specifically, Brader examines feelings of internal and external efficacy, cynicism, social trust, trust in government, trust in elected officials, and trust in the media. Ads with enthusiasm cues produced only a smattering of significant effects, and in no instance did fear cues adversely affect citizens’ attitudes, leading Brader to conclude that “evidence on the potential side effects of emotional appeals is weak and decidedly mixed.” Brader’s results speak to the possible effects of emotional cues, not to whether the full content of an ad is positive or negative. Still, Brader’s null results, particularly when coupled with Lau and Pomper’s (2004) findings, suggest that any adverse impact of negative ads on citizens’ attitudes may be less than sweeping in scope. Brooks and Geer (2007) address the possible broader effects of exposure to negative political ads. They designed a Knowledge Networks experiment and found no evidence that negative, uncivil, or trait-based messages within ads attenuate respondents’ levels of political interest, political trust, external efficacy, or political learning. Geer (2006) also considers the possible effects of negative ads on citizens’ attitudes. The analyses reveal no adverse impact of negative ads on either faith in elections or trust in government. Taking account of the research by Ansolabehere and Iyengar and the subsequent studies reviewed here, we see as inconclusive the empirical case regarding the potential impact of negative advertising on citizens’ attitudes. On the positive side, Ansolabehere and Iyengar’s thesis enjoys considerable logical appeal, and multiple studies report evidence consistent with their thesis, particularly with respect to efficacy. On the negative side, the range of attitudes examined in early work was narrow, and subsequent research has failed to generate strong support for the case against negative ads. The indictment of negative advertising is alarming. Negative ads possibly contribute to citizen apathy, and even antipathy, regarding politics. Given the importance of this claim, we seek to subject it to comprehensive empirical scrutiny. First, we assess multiple aspects of citizens’ views of politics. Second, we focus specifically on the effects of campaign advertisements, rather than overall campaign tone. Third, we examine the advertisements emanating from U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and gubernatorial campaigns, drawing data on citizens’ attitudes from a national survey with respondents in each of the one hundred largest media markets. Fourth, in addition to examining the possible general effects of negative campaign ads, we explore whether partisan status and political sophistication condition any such effects. When one recalls the most notorious political ads, it is easily imagined that exposure to such commercials produces corrosive effects. A strong two-part indictment has been leveled against negative campaign ads: that they decrease turnout and that they undermine citizens’ attitudes toward politics and government. The first portion of this indictment has produced a deluge of research in the past decade. Less research has been produced concerning the second component of the case against negative ads. As a result, the alluring thesis that negative ads adversely affect political attitudes has endured. In this study, we have sought to undertake a thorough assessment of the claim that exposure to negative political ads generates mass antipathy toward politics. Findings have been produced across multiple dependent variables and multiple specifications of possible ad effects. The bottom line is straightforward: present efforts have produced no empirical support for the case against negative ads. In retrospect, we believe that these findings are only modestly at odds with those of previous research. Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) presented provocative evidence that exposure to negative ads undermines internal and external political efficacy; however, comparable tests were not reported for other variables, the substantive effects in the efficacy models were moderate at best, and no corroboration was offered from outside the laboratory. Thorson et al. (2000) examined the correspondence between exposure to negative ads and citizens’ attitudes, but that study’s methodological approach was such that the resulting inferences are highly questionable. Lau and Pomper (2004) found no relationship between campaign tone and trust in government, nor a relationship to efficacy for most citizens. Lau and Pomper did find a slight link between campaign tone and efficacy for a narrow group of voters, but the authors themselves cast doubt on the broader significance of this finding. Most recently, Brader (2006) and Brooks and Geer (2007; see also Geer 2006) have turned up mixed, and mostly null, results when exploring the impact of negative ads on political attitudes. Nothing in the empirical record provides grounds for skepticism regarding the present study’s abundant platter of null results. To the contrary, the accumulation of null findings across multiple studies using multiple data sets and methods casts very serious doubt on the case against negative ads. This is not to say that current findings should be taken as the last word on the possible link between negative campaign ads and political attitudes. As we have emphasized, the analytical case against negative advertisements is highly compelling. Indeed, entering this research, we fully expected to obtain a wide array of evidence that negative ads are harmful. So what accounts for the dearth of empirical support? Although this is not a question we can answer conclusively, there appears to be slippage between the logical case against negative ads and how viewers actually perceive these commercials. One possibility is that citizens are sufficiently sophisticated in their thinking to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Attitudes toward the political system emerge from many sources, including day-to-day political events that have no direct connection to biennial campaigns. Citizens may have the capacity to evaluate the political system and incumbent officials on their own merits and see political ads as being of no more than peripheral relevance to these more long-term evaluations. A second, and less flattering, possibility is that viewers do link their perceptions of negative ads to assessments of other facets of politics and government, but those perceptions are unrelated to the reality of the ad content they viewed. We are skeptical of the Thorson et al. (2000) findings precisely because the correlations between ad content and political attitudes in that study hinge entirely on respondents’ perceptions. But if we set aside concerns with simultaneity and spuriousness, what those findings suggest is that when people think they have seen negative political ads, viewers downgrade their evaluations of the political system in response. We are left with the possibility that negative ads fail to undermine mass attitudes only because of the scattered, idiosyncratic character of mass perception— a possibility reinforced by the Sigelman and Kugler (2003) findings that viewers of the very same campaign form radically different perceptions of its tone and that those perceptions are at best only loosely related to the reality of those campaigns. The two scenarios outlined here enjoy intuitive merit, and it may even be that both are accurate, but for different segments of the electorate. A third possibility is that negative ads corrupt mass attitudes, but that we have failed to detect such an effect due to a deficiency in our methodological approach. Any single study will be limited in scope, and ours is no exception. In our judgment, however, the limits of the present study are not such that the case against negative ads can emerge unscathed. There is nothing subtle about the charges leveled against negative ads. The accusation is that negative ads are the single greatest cause of rising mass cynicism, declining efficacy, and mounting disapproval. These are not the sorts of effects one would expect to slip through the methodological to measure ad exposure with state-of-the-art precision. Likewise, data from our national survey have permitted unprecedented geographic breadth in the search for ad effects, and we have used a diverse set of dependent variables. Freedman, Franz, and Goldstein (2004) used less expansive data sets (seventy-five media markets versus the one hundred in the 2002 WiscAds data, and survey data gathered via a cluster design rather than a full national probability sample), and yet they found ad exposure to be related to a wide array of positive effects. If Freedman and his colleagues had no difficulty detecting positive influences of ad exposure, it strains credulity to think that our very similar approach was too coarse to detect a corresponding negative impact, particularly an impact previously hypothesized to have the delicacy of a sledgehammer. A final possibility is that we have sought evidence of harmful effects of negative ads long after the damage was done. If negative ads produce effects that accumulate over time, then perhaps cynicism, disapproval, and the like solidified well before 2002. This thesis would be challenging to test, and we cannot definitively rule it out. However, two points speak against it. First, none of the attitudinal variables examined here approached rock bottom in 2002. For example, Democratic and Republican congressional leaders each were viewed unfavorably by fewer than 35 percent of our respondents. External efficacy was low, but even here, only 58 percent of respondents reported a lack of efficacy. If negative ads corrode mass attitudes, there was more corrosion left to occur in 2002. Second, among recent election years, 2002 arguably constitutes a best case in which to find evidence that negative ads adversely affect mass attitudes. The elections fell a year after the September 11 attacks but before the start of the Iraq War, a window in time in which citizens’ political appraisals were relatively positive. Then came the 2002 campaigns, many of which were seen by analysts as among the nastiest in years. This combination of positive baseline attitudes and inflammatory campaigns seemingly should be highly conducive to the detection of adverse ad effects, yet no such effects were found. A last matter is what our results imply regarding the case against negative ads advanced by Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995). Evidence generated in cross-sectional analyses should not be viewed as disconfirming findings from the laboratory, and we make no claim that present results trump the empirical findings at issue in Ansolabehere and Iyengar – that is, that exposure to negative ads can, under certain circumstances, produce modest erosions of internal and external political efficacy. But we do believe that current results cast severe doubt on the more sweeping claims offered in that study, claims that substantially exceed the scope of its evidence. First, Ansolabehere and Iyengar assert that exposure to negative ads corrodes a wide array of political judgments, including numerous attitudes other than efficacy. Second, all of the claimed effects were posited to operate on national opinion, but no data were offered to support these assertions. We have subjected these positions to thorough empirical scrutiny and found no evidence to support them. We have approached the assessment of negative advertisements from a perspective of scientific inquiry, rather than advocacy. Hence nothing in the present study should be taken to suggest that we like negative ads or that we wish to encourage them. What we do wish to emphasize is simply that we have conducted a thorough and rigorous search for harmful effects of negative campaign commercials on citizens’ attitudes, and we have detected no evidence whatsoever to corroborate the case against negative ads.
1. scourge – бич, кара, наказание 2. efficacy – эффективность, действенность 3. prudent – благоразумный 4. malfeasance – злодеяние, должностное преступление 5. debilitating – ослабляющий 6. frenzied – взбешённый 7. writ – предписание, повестка, заявление 8. deleterious – вредный, вредоносный 9. innocuous – безвредный, безобидный 10. vituperative – бранный, ругательный 11. inflammatory – возбуждающий 12. to denigrate – чернить, клеветать, порочить 13. disenchantment – разочарование, освобождение от иллюзий 14. indictment – обвинение 15. tenuous – незначительный, тонкий 16. to dwarf – мешать росту, останавливать развитие 17. to delineate – очерчивать, обрисовывать 18. endogeneity – внутренние противоречия 19. to attenuate – истощать, ослаблять, смягчать 20. biennial – двухлетний, случающийся раз в два года 21. incumbent – наделённый обязательствами 22. unscathed – невредимый 23. sledgehammer – сокрушительный удар
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