A new research paper by Claremont McKenna College Professor Cameron Shelton shows that televised campaign advertising increases the probability that viewers who identify with a particular political party will embrace its positions, prefer its candidates, and turn out to vote.
“If a Republican candidate shows an advertisement to Republican voters, they would be more likely to vote Republican after watching the ad,” said Shelton, whose research “Mobilization and Backlash: Asymmetric Updating in Response to Campaign Ads” will be published in the forthcoming Review of Economics and Statistics. “However, if the Republican candidate showed their ad to a Democrat, the voter would be emboldened to vote Democrat.”
Shelton explained that this dynamic is referred to as “mobilization and backlash.”
“Campaign ads have the power to confirm biases on both ends of the political spectrum,” he said. “As a result, a political party gains very little by showing an ad to a politically balanced audience.”
The report examined the impact of 5.68 million television advertisements from the 2012 and 2016 federal election cycles on election results.
Shelton, a leading economist who is director of the Lowe Institute of Political Economy at Claremont McKenna, found that the powerful net effects of mobilization and backlash confirm biases, leading to a balanced dynamic among voters.
“This clearly demonstrates the potential benefits of targeting in the context of television viewing,” he said. “In today’s world, political advertising focuses on the delivery via social media of spots that are micro-targeted according to age, gender, ethnicity, Zip code, and browsing habits, which typically highlight party affiliation.”
However, he added that additional research has found that social media advertising has disadvantages, including the dismissal of unwanted information, as opposed to the relatively passive, focused attention given to TV. Streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video, whose content is consumed like television, have collected a great deal of information about their customers and are exploring targeted advertising.
“Work by other researchers has shown that social media, while doing a great job of targeting, does not actually have strong effects when it comes to encouraging voting,” said Shelton. “If partisanship is so easily cued by political advertisements, my results might seem to suggest such ads as a source of polarization. Ultimately, targeted ads in streaming is likely the way to go—and designing an ad that mobilizes a base, while not incurring the backlash effect would be key for political operatives.”