EXCERPTS

GOING NEGATIVE: How Campaign Advertising Shrinks and Polarizes the Electorate


By Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar

Television advertising is the lifeblood of political campaigns. The candidates' dependence on broadcast advertising has raised a host of questions about the practice of democracy. Elected officials from the President on down complain about being subjected to thirty second attack advertisements. Ordinary voters often find political advertising campaigns insulting to their intelligence. Within the advertising industry itself, those entrusted with the selling of household products -- the leaders of Madison Avenue firms -- condemn political advertisers as "unprofessional." Media pundits characterize campaign advertising as uninformative, deceptive, and manipulative; an "infection" which has now spread from political campaigns into the broader arena of policy debates.

Notwithstanding the growing impatience and alarm about the uses of political advertising, very little careful empirical research has ever been conducted into the effects of campaign advertisements on voters' attitudes, candidates' strategies, or electoral outcomes. Much of the conventional wisdom can accurately be described as working hypotheses or intuitive hunches. Until now we simply have not known whether, or to what extent, the popular criticisms of political advertising are well founded.

The authors of this book set out in 1990 to examine the effects of television advertising on voters and elections. Their goal was to undertake the first comprehensive, empirically based study into the effects of campaign advertising on democratic functioning. Their results are largely unexpected. Some of the most frequently expressed and widely accepted criticisms of political advertising are unjustified, while the policy issues which should be of particular concern are not the ones encountered so frequently on America's editorial pages. In contrast to the prevailing suspicion, political advertising is by no means uninformative. Nor does their evidence support the theory that advertising deceives and misleads voters. The danger posed by campaign advertising is not one of deception or manipulation. Rather, the striking finding of this book is that the real threat posed by political advertising to democratic functioning is the systematic demobilization of voters; politicians and their consultants resort to negative advertising to keep people from voting.


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November 23, 1995