Campaign Advertising and the Cultivation of Crime Worry: Testing Relationships With Two Large Datasets From the 2016 U.S. Election Cycle

Previous research has documented that political information in the mass media can shape attitudes and behaviors beyond voter choice and election turnout. The current study extends this body of work to examine associations between televised political campaign advertising (one of the most common forms of political communication people encounter) and worry about crime and violence in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We merge two large datasets—Kantar/CMAG data on televised campaign advertisement airings ( n = 3,767,477) and Simmons National Consumer Survey (NCS) data on television viewing patterns and public attitudes ( n = 26,703 respondents in the United States)—to test associations between estimated exposure to campaign ads about crime and crime worry, controlling for demographics, local crime rates, and political factors. Results from multivariate models show that estimated cumulative exposure to campaign ads about crime is associated with higher levels of crime worry. Exposure to campaign ads about crime increased crime worry among Republicans, but not Democrats.

How Campaign Ads Stimulate Political Interest

We empirically investigate key dynamic features of advertising competition in elections using a new dataset of very high-frequency, household-level television viewing matched to campaign advertising exposures. First, we show that exposure to campaign advertising increases households’ consumption of news programming by 3-4 minutes on average over the next 24 hours. The identification compares households viewing a program when a political ad appeared to viewers in the same market who barely missed it. Second, we show that these effects decline over the campaign. Together, these dynamic forces help rationalize why candidates deploy much of their advertising budgets well before election day.

Relationship between Drug Overdose Mortality and Coverage of Drug-Related Issues in US Television Political Campaign Advertising in the 2012 and 2016 Election Cycles

Context: Understanding the role of drug-related issues in political campaign advertising can provide insight on the salience of this issue and the priorities of candidates for elected office. This study sought to quantify the share of campaign advertising mentioning drugs in the 2012 and 2016 election cycles and to estimate the association between local drug overdose mortality and drug mentions in campaign advertising across US media markets. Methods: The analysis used descriptive and spatial statistics to examine geographic variation in campaign advertising mentions of drugs across all 210 US media markets, and it used multivariable regression to assess area-level factors associated with that variation. Findings: The share of campaign ads mentioning drugs grew from 0.5% in the 2012 election cycle to 1.6% in the 2016 cycle. In the 2016 cycle, ads airing in media markets with overdose mortality rates in the 95th percentile were more than three times as likely to mention drugs as ads airing in areas with overdose mortality rates in the 5th percentile. Conclusions: A small proportion of campaign advertising mentioned drug-related issues. In the 2016 cycle, the issue was more prominent in advertising in areas hardest hit by the drug overdose crisis and in advertising for local races.

From the Subliminal to the Ridiculing

In studies conducted by scholars of political science, rhetoric, and media studies, the vast majority of research on political ads focuses either on images or on verbal appeals made by candidates or on their behalf. Yet the highest voter recall is for ads that make an emotional connection with the viewer. Often music is the lynchpin of an emotional appeal, and philosophers such as Jenefer Robinson and Derek Matravers write of the centrality of emotion to the musical experience. Recent scholarship on the relationship between emotion and politics includes the work of Ted Brader on emotional appeals in campaign ads and Drew Westen on the role of emotion in political thinking. Focusing on four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and two compound emotions (patriotism and contempt), this chapter explores how music evokes these emotions in several case studies.

Campaigns, Competition, and Support for Political Compromise

Campaigns draw people into the partisan practice of politics, through close competition, campaign ads, and calls to take sides. Yet the conflicts of contentious campaigns may do little to encourage compromise, instead leading voters to call on their representatives to deliver on their campaign promises. This chapter shows rather than close the door to compromise, conflicts instead serve as a reminder that other people want different things than we do in politics, disrupting people’s tendencies to assume most others agree with them. Analysis of survey data shows that people who live in states marked by close partisan divides are more likely to prefer a president who is willing to consider compromise. Experimental data confirm that when people learn that other Americans want different policy outcomes, they become more willing to consider compromise solutions.

Partisan Ambivalence and Electoral Decision Making

American politics today is driven largely by deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans. That said, there are many people who view the opposition in an overwhelmingly negative light – but who simultaneously possess a mix of positive and negative feelings toward their own party. This paper is a response to prior research (e.g., Lavine, Johnson, and Steenbergen 2012) indicating that such ambivalence increases the probability that voters will engage in "deliberative" (or "effortful") rather than "heuristic" thinking when responding to the choices presented to them in political campaigns. We extend the logic of this argument to a hypothetical race for Congress, using data from a survey experiment to determine whether a high degree of ambivalence toward one's party makes voters more responsive to a negative attack against the candidate of that party. In fact, we find little evidence that partisan ambivalence promotes a deliberative response to negative campaign ads.

Reprehensible, Laughable: The Role of Contempt in Negative Campaigning

Negativity is common in political rhetoric and advertising, but its effects are variable. One important moderator may be the specific emotions communicated by the messages and potentially in recipients. Contempt may be the emotion often conveyed by uncivil ads, which have attracted considerable interest, particularly in light of increased partisan polarization. Using data from web-based surveys in New Jersey and Iowa, we examine the role contempt played in two U.S. Senate races in 2014. We find respondents perceived contempt—more than anxiety or anger—in four televised negative campaign ads and in candidates’ statements about opponents. Moreover, respondents’ feelings of contempt toward candidates, though less intense than feelings of anger, were of equal or greater significance than anger or anxiety in predicting voting intentions regarding three of the four Senate candidates across the two elections.