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美国耶鲁大学政治学论硕士文定制“Targeted” Advertising and Voter Turnout: An Experimental Study of the 2000 Presidential Election
Joshua D. Clinton
Princeton University
John S. Lapinski
Yale University
Scholars disagree whether negative advertising demobilizes or stimulates the electorate. We use anexperiment with over 10,200 eligible voters to evaluate the two leading hypotheses of negative political
advertising. We extend the analysis to examine whether advertising differentially impacts theturnout of voter subpopulations depending on the advertisement’s message. In the short term, we find
no evidence that exposure to negative advertisements decreases turnout and little that suggests itincreases turnout. Any effect appears to depend upon the message of the advertisement and the characteristics
of the viewer. In the long term, we find little evidence that the information contained inthe treatment groups’ advertisements is sufficient to systematically alter turnout.Political pollsters, Media consultants, members of the press, and scholars hold
various opinions on whether “negative” advertising is destabilizing democracy inAmerica. The idea that negative campaigns decrease voter turnout and increasevoter apathy was advanced by academics and warmly received by the news media.
While perhaps intuitive and certainly eye-catching, this idea has recently come
under attack.In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, scholars focused their attention onshowing how campaigns matter. This work represents a direct attack on theminimal effects hypothesis associated with the Columbia and Michigan schools
of voting (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948; Berelson, Lazarsfeld, andMcPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960; Campbell 2000). Of particular interest is
the question of whether political advertisements—especially negativeadvertisements—demobilize or stimulate voters.
Interest in the relationship between campaigns and voting has persisted for overfifty years, but only recently have researchers argued that political advertising hascontributed heavily to the disappearance of voters. Although scholars have usedmany methods to test if negative advertisements increase or decrease turnout,much remains unsettled.
THE JOURNAL OF Politics, Vol. 66, No. 1, February 2004, Pp. 69–96
© 2004 Southern Political Science Association
This article contributes to the conversation regarding advertising effects inseveral ways. First, we employ a large scale, controlled, randomized experimentto evaluate the two leading theories of advertising effects. In doing so, our workprovides a valuable, but to date absent, experimentally based examination of both
the demobilization and stimulation hypotheses. This is important since the onlyprevious large-scale experimental study is the highly influential and controversialGoing Negative study of Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995)—a study thatshows that negative advertising is causally related to lower levels of voter turnout.
Second, we design our experiments to test for both the immediate effects of political
advertising as well as for possible lasting effects. Ours is the first experimentally
based study to test for long-term effects. This move is important since
researchers are ultimately concerned with whether advertising has an effect that
persists beyond the laboratory.
A third contribution is more theoretical in nature. Relying upon interviews with
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