But how much does all this advertising matter, negative or positive?
Voters may be so tired of politics that they don’t feel swayed by ads. Some people say, “No ad has ever convinced me to do anything,” says Brett Gordon, a marketing professor at Kellogg.
But in a new study, Gordon and his colleagues report that TV ads influence voter turnout and choice — and that the tone of the ad makes a difference. Based on data from the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the team found that positive ads encouraged more people to show up on Election Day, while negative ads slightly reduced turnout. And while both types of ads influenced the people they supported, the negative ones were more effective at influencing voter decisions.
In hypothetical scenarios, the researchers found that the tone of the ad was sometimes enough to lead to close elections. For example, the team predicted that if only positive ads had run, Al Gore would have won in 2000.
The results suggest that in close races, “political TV ads matter,” says Gordon. “They drive results.”
Conflicting results
Researchers have tried to understand the effects of political television ads in the past. But the picture has remained murky.
For example, research on voter participation has produced mixed results. Some studies that evaluated the overall influence of ads, without distinguishing between positive or negative, found that ads did not affect participation. Among the researchers who analyzed specific types of ads, some reported having both positive and negative ads small effect; others found that negative ads increased attendance; and other negative ads reduced attendance.
If attack ads discourage people from voting, that’s important for policymakers to know, Gordon says. “From the perspective of a democracy, you would want as many people as possible to participate,” he says.
For example, it might make sense to pass a regulation that limits the types of ads that can run or the time period they run, rather than allowing endless months of attack ads. Or, since negative ads tend to be more common than positive ones, critics of Super PACs could argue that these organizations shouldn’t be allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising.
And if ads don’t have much of an impact on voters, that would mean campaigns are wasting billions of dollars every election cycle. But political groups clearly think these ads are worth it. So if some academic studies suggest that TV ads are not influential, “are we wrong or are they wrong?” Gordon asks.
Nice or ugly?
To find out, Gordon teamed up with James Reeder at Purdue University and Mitchell J. Lovett and Bowen Luo at Northeastern University. The researchers obtained data from Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG) for presidential campaign television ads in 75 designated market areas from September to November 2000 and 2004.
For each ad, CMAG provided details such as when it was shown and who sponsored it. The organization categorized the ads based on whether they promoted the candidate, attacked the opponent or contrasted the two candidates. For the purposes of this study, Gordon’s team considered the first category to be positive and the second and third categories to be negative.
The researchers also collected voting data on 1,607 counties from polidata.org. They then created an economic model to capture how people responded to the ads. The team estimated parameter values—such as, say, the effect of positive advertising from a Democratic candidate on a voter’s decision about whether to turn out and who to support—that made the model match real-world data as well as possible.
The Power of Badmouthing
They found that ads affected overall participation in different ways. If a candidate increased their positive advertising by 1 percent, voter turnout increased by 0.03 percent. If they increased negative ads by the same amount, voter turnout decreased, but only by 0.007 percent.
“Positive ads have a much larger and more significant effect of driving attendance,” says Gordon.
In contrast, negative ads had a greater effect on voter turnout. A 1 percent increase in such ads increased the percentage of people who voted for the sponsor candidate by 0.025 percent. Positive ads were associated with a more modest increase of 0.016%.
Part of the reason may be that generally negative statements tend to carry more weight, Gordon says. Many of us have experienced the same phenomenon when looking at online reviews.
“Even if you read 10 good reviews of a restaurant, it’s always the one negative review that really sticks with you,” he says.
Submit an election
So how big are these effects, really? Could a candidate’s choices about what type of ads actually be enough to sway an election?
To determine the practical impact of their findings, the team ran a series of hypothetical scenarios. In the first, only positive ads were allowed. All of the money spent on advertising this election cycle went to this type of advertising. In the second scenario, all ads were negative.
The researchers found that, in the 2000 election, allowing only positive ads would have increased overall voter turnout from 50.4 percent to 52.4 percent. Meanwhile, showing only negative ads would have reduced engagement to 48.8%. The gap between the completely positive and completely negative scenarios was about 10 million voters.
“That’s a big one,” says Gordon. It “suggests that negative ads can have a detrimental effect” on turnout.
The team then reviewed the election results. If all the ads were positive, Bush would have won Wisconsin, but Gore would have taken Florida and, with it, the election. If all the ads were negative, Bush would simply have a larger lead over Gore.
But in the 2004 election, the race wasn’t close enough for the tone of the ad to make a difference. Bush would still have beaten John Kerry in either scenario.
The results suggest that while positive ads encourage people to participate, their participation will not always make a difference. “A lot of those voters will turn out in states that aren’t battleground states,” Gordon says.
If the election is too close, however, the result could be flipped in one or two key states. “And obviously we’re talking about a presidential election, so it’s a big deal,” he says.
A winning strategy
The study raises the question of whether candidates can improve their chances of winning by strategically changing the mix of positive and negative ads.
In another hypothetical scenario the team looked at, one candidate optimized their ad campaign by calculating the effects on turnout and voter turnout, while the other candidate left their strategy unchanged. As you might expect, Gore would have won in 2000 if he had optimized his advertising strategy and Bush had not.
In reality, however, both campaigns are likely using similar information to decide how to target their ads. When the researchers ran a scenario in which both candidates optimized their ads, the election results remained unchanged. Bush’s change of strategy would “wash away the effect of any Gore change,” says Gordon.
Opposing Forces
Previous studies of TV ads that had little effect on voter turnout may have missed these trends because they did not separate positive from negative ads. “If you don’t distinguish between these types of ads, you can have a very confusing result,” says Gordon. “They’re moving in opposite directions.”
It may be true that most people are immune to the persuasive power of political ads. But if the ads manage to sway one or two voters out of 1,000 who watch them, “you start to have the margin in Ohio or the margin in Florida,” he says.
And people should take the possibility of attendance suppression seriously. “We as citizens should be concerned about the motivation of candidates to rely on negative ads and be aware that this affects our political life,” says Gordon.
