The effects of issue advocacy advertising on voter's candidate issue knowledge and turnout

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 83, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 7-24

  An, Soontae ^a   Jin, Hyun Seung ^a   Pfau, Michael ^b  

^a KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY; MEDIA ROLE; VOTING BEHAVIOR;

CANADA; NORTH AMERICA;

EID: 33745309865     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900608300102     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. Annenberg Public Policy Center, Issue Advertising in the 1999-2000 Election Cycle (2004), 20. Available from the World Wide Web: .
2. Stephen Moore, "Issue Ads: Let'Em Rip," Washington Post, 18 September 2004, sec. A, p. 25.
3. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).
4. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), footnote 52.
5. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).
6. Darrell M. West and Burdett A. Loomis, The Sound of Money: How Political Interests Get What They Want (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
7. David B. Magleby, "The Impact of Issue Advocacy and Party Soft Money Electioneering," in The Medium and The Message: Television Advertising and American Elections, ed. Kenneth M. Goldstein and Patricia Strach (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), 84-104.
8. David B. Magleby, Outside Money: Soft Money and Issue Advocacy in the 1998 Congressional Elections (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
9. Moore, "Issue Ads: Let'Em Rip."
10. Magleby, "The Impact."
11. Robert Dreyfuss, "Harder than Soft Money," American Prospect 36 (January 1998): 30.
12. Craig Wilson, "The 2000 Montana Senate Race," in Election Advocacy: Soft Money and Issue Advocacy in the 2000 Congressional Elections, ed. David B. Magleby, report presented at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, February 2001, 93-94.
13. Magleby, "The Impact."
14. Gina M. Garramone, "Effects of Negative Political Advertising: The Roles of Sponsor and Rebuttal," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 29 (spring 1985): 147-59;
15. Eric W. Groenendyk and Nicholas A. Valentino, "Of Dark Clouds and Silver Linings: Effects of Exposure to Issue versus Candidate Advertising on Persuasion, Information Retention, and Issue Salience," Communication Research 29 (June 2002): 295-319;
16. Michael Pfau, David Park, R. Lance Holbert, and Jaeho Cho, "The Effects of Party-and PAC-Sponsored Issue Advertising and the Potential Inoculation to Combat Its Impacts on the Democratic Process," American Behavioral Scientist 44 (August 2001): 2379-97;
17. Michael Pfau, Lance Holbert, Erin Alison Szabo, and Kelly Kaminski, "Issue-Advocacy versus Candidate Advertising: Effects on Candidate Preferences and Democratic Process," Journal of Communication 52 (June 2002): 301-15.
18. Pfau et al., "Issue-Advocacy."
19. Groenendyk and Valentino, "Of Dark Clouds."
20. Thomas E. Patterson and Robert D. McClure, The Unseeing Eye: The Myth of Television Power in National Elections (New York: Putnam, 1976).
21. C. Richard Hofstetter and Cliff Zukin, "TV Network News and Advertising in the Nixon and McGovern Campaigns," Journalism Quarterly 56 (spring 1979): 106-15;
22. C. Richard Hofstetter, Cliff Zukin, and Terry F. Buss, "Political Imagery and Information in an Age of Television," Journalism Quarterly 55 (autumn 1978): 562-69;
23. Richard A. Joslyn, "The Content of Political Spot Ads," Journalism Quarterly 57 (spring 1980): 92-98;
24. Darrell M. West, Air Wars: Television Advertising in Election Campaigns, 1952-1996 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1997).
25. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar, Going Negative: How Political Advertising Shrinks and Polarizes the Electorate (NY: Free Press, 1995);
26. Charles Atkin and Gary Heald, "Effects of Political Advertising," Public Opinion Quarterly 40 (summer 1976): 216-28;
27. Craig L. Brians and Martin P. Wattenberg, "Campaign Issue Knowledge and Salience: Comparing Reception from TV Commercials, TV News, and Newspapers," American Journal of Political Science 40 (February 1996): 172-93;
28. Garramone, "Effects of Negative";
29. R. Lance Holbert, William L. Benoit, Glenn J. Hansen, and Wei-Chun Wen, "The Role of Communication in the Formation of an Issue-Based Citizenry," Communication Monographs 69 (winter 2002): 296-310;
30. Marion Just, Ann Crigler, and Lori Wallach, "Thirty Seconds or Thirty Minutes: What Viewers Learn from Spot Advertisements and Candidate Debates," Journal of Communication 40 (summer 1990): 120-33;
31. Kathleen A. Martinelli and Steven H. Chaffee, "Measuring New-Voter Learning via Three Channels of Political Information," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 72 (spring 1995): 18-32;
32. Patterson and McClure, The Unseeing Eye;
33. David Weaver and Dan Drew, "Voter Learning in the 1990 Off-year Election: Did the Media Matter?" Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 70 (summer 1993): 356-68.
34. See Steven H. Chaffee, Xinshu Zhao, and Glenn Leshner, "Political Knowledge and the Campaign Media of 1992," Communication Research 21 (June 1994): 305-24;
35. Dan Drew and David Weaver, "Voter Learning in the 1988 Presidential Election: Did the Debates and the Media Matter?" Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 68 (spring 1991): 27-37;
36. Dan Drew and David Weaver, "Voter Learning in the 1996 Presidential Election: Did the Media Matter?" Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 75 (summer 1998): 292-31.
37. Xinshu Zhao and Glen Bleske, "Polling Effects: Horse-Race Polls and Audience Issue Learning," Harvard International Journal of Press and Politics 3 (fall 1998): 13-34.
38. Annenberg Public Policy Center, Issue Advertising, 6.
39. Ken Goldstein and Paul Freedman, "Campaign Advertising and Voter Turnout: New Evidence for a Stimulation Effect," The Journal of Politics 64 (August 2002): 721-40.
40. Kenneth M. Goldstein, "What Did They See and When Did They See It? Measuring The Volume, Tone, and Targeting of Television Advertising in the 2000 Presidential Election," in The Medium and The Message, ed. Goldstein and Strach.
41. Constantine Sedikides, Patricia G. Devine, and Robert W. Fuhrman, "Social Perception in Multitarget Settings: Effects of Motivated Encoding Strategies," Personality Social Psychology Bulletin 17 (May 1991): 625-32;
42. Thomas Srull, "Organizational and Retrieval Processes in Person Memory: An Examination of Processing Objectives, Presentation Format, and Self-Generated Retrieval Cues," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44 (May 1983): 1157-70;
43. Wendy M. Rahn, "Candidate Evaluation in Complex Information Environments: Cognitive Organization and Comparison Processes," in Political Judgment: Structure and Process, ed. M. Lodge and K. M. McGraw (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995);
44. Wendy M. Rahn, John Aldrich, and Eugene Borgida, "Individual and Contextual Variations in Political Candidate Appraisal," American Political Science Review 88 (March 1994): 193-99.
45. Rahn, Aldrich, and Borgida, "Individual and Contextual Variations";
46. Rahn, "Candidate Evaluation."
47. Richard R. Lau, "Negativity in Political Perceptions," Political Behavior 4 (winter 1982): 353-77;
48. Richard R. Lau, "Two Explanations for Negativity Effects in Political Behavior," American Journal of Political Science 29 (February 1985): 119-38.
49. Naveen Donthu, "A Cross-country Investigation of Recall of and Attitude toward Comparative Advertising," Journal of Advertising 27 (summer 1998): 111-22;
50. Cornelia Droge, "Shaping the Route to Attitude Change: Central Versus Peripheral Processing Through Comparative Versus Noncomparative Advertising," Journal of Marketing Research 26 (summer 1989): 193-204;
51. Darrel D. Muehling and Norman Kangan, "The Multidimensionality of Comparative Advertising: Implications for Federal Trade Commission," Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 4 (sprin 1991): 112-28;
52. Kanti Prasad, "Communications-Effectiveness of Comparative Advertising: A Laboratory Analysis," Journal of Marketing Research 13 (summer 1976): 128-37.
53. Margaret Campbell, "When Attention-Getting Advertising Tactics Elicit Consumer Inferences of Manipulative Intent: The Importance of Balancing Benefits and Investments," Journal of Consumer Psychology 4 (fall 1995): 225-54;
54. Margaret Campbell, "Perceptions of Price Unfairness: Antecedents and Consequences," Journal of Marketing Research 36 (May 1999): 187-99;
55. Marian Friestad and Peter Wright, "The Persuasion Knowledge Model: How People Cope with Persuasion Attempts," Journal of Consumer Research 21 (June 1994): 1-31;
56. Marian Friestad and Peter Wright, "Persuasion Knowledge: Lay People's and Researchers' Beliefs about the Psychology of Advertising," Journal of Consumer Research 22 (June 1995): 62-74;
57. Amna Kirmani, "The Effect of Perceived Advertising Costs on Brand Perceptions," Journal of Consumer Research 17 (September 1990): 160-71;
58. Amna Kirmani and Peter Wright, "Money Talks: Perceived Advertising Expense and Expected Product Quality," Journal of Consumer Research 16 (December 1989): 344-53.
59. Margaret Campbell and Amna Kirmani, "Consumers' Use of Persuasion Knowledge: The Effects of Accessibility and Cognitive Capacity on Perceptions of an Influence Agent," Journal of Consumer Research 27 (June 2000): 69-83.
60. Steven Fein, James L. Hilton, and Dale T. Miller, "Suspicion of Ulterior Motivation and the Correspondence Bias," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (May 1990): 753-64;
61. Ross Vonk, "The Slime Effect: Suspicion and Dislike of Likable Behavior toward Superiors," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (December 1998): 849-64;
62. Ross Vonk, "Impression Formation and Impression Management: Motives, Traits, and Likeability Inferred from Self-Promoting and Self-Deprecating Behavior," Social Cognition 17 (December 1999): 390-412.
63. Steven Fein, "Effects of Suspicion on Attributional Thinking and the Correspondence Bias," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (June 1996): 1164-84.
64. Friestad and Wright, "The Persuasion Knowledge Model";
65. Friestad and Wright, "Persuasion Knowledge."
66. Campbell and Kirmani, "Consumers' Use of Persuasion Knowledge."
67. Groenendyk and Valentino, "Of Dark Clouds"
68. Garramone, "Effects of Negative."
69. Magleby, "The Impact."
70. Magleby, "The Impact."
71. Robert R. Harmon and Kenneth A. Coney, "The Persuasive Effects of Source Credibility in Buy and Lease Situations," Journal of Marketing Research 19 (May 1982): 255-60;
72. R. Glen Hass and Kathlenn Grady, "Temporal Delay, Type of Forewarning and Resistance to Influence," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 11 (July 1975): 459-69;
73. Charles A. Kiesler and Sara B. Kiesler, "Role of Forewarning in Persuasiveness Communications," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 68 (November 1964): 547-49;
74. Lawrence R. Wheeless and Janis Grotz, "The Measurements of Trust and Its Relationship to Self-disclosure," Human Communication Research 3 (April 1977): 250-57.
75. Karen S. Johnson-Cartee and Gary A. Copeland, Inside Political Campaigns: Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997).
76. Alan Greenblatt, "Issue Ads Often More Burden Than Blessing for Candidates," Congressional Quarterly (February 1998): 354-55.
77. Stephen Ansolabehere, Shanto Iyengar, Adam Simon, and Nicholas Valentino, "Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate?" American Political Science Review 88 (December 1994): 829-38.
78. Larry M. Bartels, "Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections," American Journal of Political Science 40 (February 1996): 194-230;
79. Steven E. Finkel and John G. Geer, "A Spot Check: Casting Doubt on the Demobilizing Effect of Attack Advertising," American Journal of Political Science 42 (April 1998): 573-595;
80. Paul Freedman and Ken Goldstein, "Measuring Media Exposure and the Effects of Negative Campaign Ads," American Journal of Political Science 43 (October 1999): 1189-1208;
81. Goldstein and Freedman, "Campaign Advertising"
82. Kim Fridkin Kahn and Patrick J. Kenney, "Do Negative Campaigns Mobilize or Suppress Turnout? Clarifying the Relationship between Negativity and Participation," American Political Science Review 93 (December 1999): 877-89;
83. Martin P. Wattenberg and Craig L. Brians, "Negative Campaign Advertising: Demobilizer or Mobilizer?" American Political Science Review 93 (December 1999): 892-99.
84. Wattenberg and Brians, "Negative Campaign Advertising."
85. Goldstein and Freedman, "Campaign Advertising."
86. Garramone, "Effects of Negative."
87. Groenendyk and Valentino, "Of Dark Clouds."
88. Richard R. Lau and Gerald M. Pomper, "Effects of Negative Campaigning on Turnout in U.S. Senate Elections, 1988-1998," The Journal of Politics 63 (August 2001): 804-19.
89. Michael A. Shapiro and Robert H. Rieger, "Comparing Positive and Negative Political Advertising on Radio," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 69 (spring 1992): 135-45.
90. Kahn and Kenney, "Do Negative Campaigns Mobilize and Suppress Turnout?"
91. David Niven, "The Mobilization Solution? Face-to-Face Contact and Voter Turnout in a Municipal Election," Journal of Politics 66 (August 2004): 868-84.
92. Jaideep Sengupta and Gavan Fitzsimmons, "The Effects of Analyzing Reasons for Brand Preferences: Disruption or Reinforcement?" Journal of Marketing Research 37 (fall 2000): 318-30.
93. Finkel and Geer, "A Spot Check."
94. Finkel and Geer, "A Spot Check";
95. George E. Marcus and Michael B. MaKuen, "Anxiety, Enthusiasm and the Vote: The Emotional Underpinnings of Learning and Involvement during Presidential Campaigns," American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993): 672-85.
96. Kenneth Goldstein and Travis N. Ridout, "Measuring the Effects of Televised Political Advertising in the United States," Annual Review of Political Science 7 (May 2004): 205-226.
97. Annenberg Public Policy Center, Issue Advertising, 5.
98. Freedman and Goldstein, "Measuring Media Exposure";
99. Goldstein and Freedman," Campaign Advertising."
100. There are over 2000 media markets in the United States, but over 80% of the population lives in the top 75 media markets.
101. Through a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the CMAG data were purchased by the Brennan Center at New York University. The data were processed and coded by teams at the University of Wisconsin.
102. Based on a sample of 135 ads, coders agreed 99% of the time on the objective of the ad and 98% of the time on the tone of the ad. Percentage agreements do not take into account coder agreement that occurs strictly by chance. Reliability methods such as Scott's pi will take this into account. Although the original study only reports simple percentage agreements, given the extremely high percentage agreements, Scott's pi score is expected to be an acceptable level.
103. Freedman and Goldstein, "Measuring Media Exposure."
104. See Drew and Weaver, "Voter Learning in the 1988 Presidential Election";
105. Brians and Wattenberg, "Campaign Issue Knowledge."
106. Vincent Price and John Zaller, "Who Gets the News? Alternative Measures of News Reception and Their Implications for Research," Public Opinion Quarterly 57 (summer 1993): 133-64.
107. Similar indices for newspaper reading and TV news watching were used by Brians and Wattenberg's analysis of 1996 NES data and Holbert et al.'s analysis of 1996 NES data. In the Brians and Wattenberg study, Cronbach's alpha of newspaper reading was .61 and that of TV news watching was .65. In the Holbert et al. study, Cronbach's alpha of newspaper reading was .60 and that of TV news was .69; Brians and Wattenberg, "Campaign Issue Knowledge";
108. Holbert et al., "The Role of Communication."
109. E.g., Brians and Wattenberg, "Campaign Issue Knowledge";
110. Holbert et al., "The Role of Communication";
111. John P. Robinson and Mark R. Levy, "Interpersonal Communication and News Comprehension," Public Opinion Quarterly 50 (summer 1986): 160-76;
112. Jian-Hua Zhu, J. Ronald Milavsky, and Rahul Biswas, "Do Televised Debates Affect Image Perception More than Issue Knowledge? A Study of the First 1992 Presidential Debate," Human Communication Research 20 (March 1994): 302-33.
113. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).
114. Thomas R. Palfrey and Keith T. Poole, "The Relationship between Information, Ideology, and Voting Behavior," American Journal of Political Science 31 (August 1987): 511-30.
115. Drew and Weaver, "Voter Learning in the 1988 Presidential Election"
116. Holbert et al., "The Role of Communication."
117. Brians and Wattenberg's study, "Campaign Issue Knowledge," based on 1992 NES data, displays similar effect sizes for communication variables with the introduction of general political knowledge in the regression equation.
118. Price and Zaller, "Who Gets the News?"
119. Brians and Wattenberg, "Campaign Issue Knowledge";
120. Holbert et al., "The Role of Communication."
121. In December 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld all the key provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. The Court imposed increased limitations and disclosure requirements for issue advocacy ads, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003).