BROAD RESEARCH ON NEGATIVE POLITICAL ADS
Apr 27th, 1998 • Posted in: Research ReportOn April 17, 1998, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies of the American University held a conference called “Political Advertising in Election Campaigns.” Top scholars and political consultants from around the country presented work on political advertising–most notably on negative advertising.
The effects, “good” and “bad,” of negative advertising are the subject of much recent debate. Conventional wisdom says that while the public rightly hates negative political advertising, such ads work and so they will always be with us. Inside the political science community, however, a different sort of conventional wisdom holds sway: Negative ads help the political process. And they work. So they will always be with us.
Each side of this debate appears to have data to support its position: Studies alternately seem to show that either political attack advertising depresses voter turnout or a good, heated campaign tends to increase it. There does not yet seem to be consensus on where all the data points.
Into this scene comes new research, presented at the conference and titled “The Effectiveness of Negative Political Advertising: A Literature Review,” done by Dr. Richard Lau (a political science professor at Rutgers University) and Dr. Lee Sigelman (a political scientist at George Washington University). They are among the top thinkers in this field.
Lau and Sigelman have been synthesizing all of the existing research on the subject of negative political advertising in an effort to draw conclusions that are independent from any particular study methodology. This work may have the effect of helping to make sense out of all the competing studies.
They set out to test conventional wisdom, to see what the data really says. In other words, Lau and Sigelman set out to test the following model statement: Negative ads work, even though voters hate them, and they tend to disenfranchise the electorate.
The results, depending on what side of the debate you are on, are surprising. Among Lau and Sigelman’s findings:
- In a study of voters in 1997, attitudes toward candidates who use negative ads decreased and attitudes toward the “target” of the ads increased.
- A 1992 study showed that candidates who initiated negative ads lost 18 out of 25 elections.
- In a study in 1995, candidates using negative ads were less likely to be remembered than those using positive ads.
Overall, the scholars find conventional wisdom only to be partially correct:
Our review . . . concludes that negative ads are probably liked less than positive ads, but they are not reliably any more memorable, and there is no good evidence that they are any more effective than positive ads. . . . However, there is a reasonable chance that, at least in some circumstances, the widespread use of negative political advertisements has consequences that most of us would consider unhealthy for democracy. . . .
Of these conclusions, the most surprising–but the one in which we have the greatest confidence, based on existing research–is that negative political ads are no more effective than positive political ads.
For more detailed excerpts of the paper, see the Project on Campaign Conduct site.
–Brad Rourke
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