Going positive: The effects of negative and positive advertising on candidate success and voter turnout

 Given the depth of research on negative advertising in campaigns, scholars have wondered why candidates continue to attack their opponents. We build on this research by considering real-world campaign contexts in which candidates are working in competition with each other and have to react to the decisions of the opposing campaign. Our results suggest that it is never efficacious for candidates to run attack ads, but running positive ads can increase a candidate’s margin of victory. These results are conditioned by two factors: candidates must both stay positive and out-advertise their opponent. Second, the effects of positive advertising are strongest in areas where the candidate is losing or winning by a large margin—areas where they might be tempted to not advertise at all.

Keywords 

Negative advertising, campaigns, voter turnout

Despite the millions of dollars that are spent on campaign advertising each election season, scholars studying the effects of campaign advertising have found mixed evidence of the efficacy of these ads. Lau et al. (1999, 2007) conducted a meta-analysis of the studies on campaign tone and campaign advertising tone and summarized the results by stating that

[a]ll told the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign. Nor is there any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government, and possibly overall public mood. (p.1176)

They find similar results in the literature pertaining to positive ads—the results of these studies are inconsistent and often null.

Many researchers wonder why campaigns continue to employ negative ads if they seem to have no impact on the election (e.g. Lau and Pomper, 2004). One reason, we suggest, is because few studies focus on actual campaign dynamics and consider how strategies are employed to win elections.

Candidates and political consultants are not generally concerned within the context of an election about topics important to democratic theorists like political efficacy, trust in government, and “political mood.” For a candidate or campaign consultant, if only a handful of people vote in the election because everyone else believes their vote does not matter, distrusts the government, or is turned off, that is fine as long as their candidate wins the majority of the few votes that are cast. Using this logic, if attack ads drive down turnout, as long as it’s the opposition’s supporters who do not show up at the polls, attack advertising is to the candidate’s strategic advantage. Thus, the germane question to campaigners is “which type of advertising will help or hurt my candidate?” This is a question that is not well addressed in the majority of the literature. Moreover, candidates cannot control the overall “tone” of the election. They can only control their own advertising decisions. As a result, the vast majority of the literature on the effects of campaign and advertising tone are not applicable to candidates.

The literature also fails to address another important element of campaign strategy in regard to campaign advertising. Strategic candidates have to make decisions about how much money and time to devote to different geographic areas in addition to the decision about whether they should go “positive” or “negative”. As Shaw (2006) notes, there are “blackout” and “battleground” states: battleground states are those states that are considered “competitive” and so presidential candidates focus their campaigns to “win” these votes; blackout states are those in which one candidate is guaranteed to win and so candidates spend very few campaign resources in these areas. While this literature has focused on the strategic decisions of presidential campaigns, this is also a choice that candidates must make within states. Designated Market Areas (DMAs) vary in terms of how competitive they are, and senatorial and gubernatorial candidates must make a choice: devote money to DMAs in which they are guaranteed to win (or lose), or devote more money to areas which are up for grabs.