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Political Behavior

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17.10.2017 | Original Paper

Seeing Spots: Partisanship, Negativity and the Conditional Receipt of Campaign Advertisements

verfasst von: John A. Henderson, Alexander G. Theodoridis

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 4/2018

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Abstract

Changes in the media landscape increasingly put voters in control of the amount and type of political content they consume. We develop a novel experiment to assess the factors that drive this conditional receipt of information. We focus on how party source and tone interact with partisanship to influence the campaign messages voters seek out or avoid, as discretion over self-exposure varies. We randomly expose subjects to comparable positive or negative television ads aired by Democratic or Republican candidates from the 2012 Presidential election, and measure subjects’ propensities to skip, re-watch and share the spots. Partisans avoid out-party ads, albeit asymmetrically: Republicans are more consistent partisan screeners than Democrats. We find more such selectivity as discretion increases, but little evidence that negativity influences self-exposure. Our findings provide greater insight into the forces behind information selectivity, and have important implications for elections in the post-broadcast era.

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Data and code to reproduce analysis are available on the Political Behavior Dataverse at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WP7ETR.

Indeed by 2016, more voters now say they primarily use online sources (30%) to learn about elections, than they do either cable (24%) or broadcast (10%) television (Gottfried et al. 2016). This ongoing trend has prompted presidential campaigns to increase online ad spending from $78 million in 2012, to over $1 billion by 2016 (Kurtzleben 2016).

We also replicated this study through a virtually-identical experiment for the 2013 Gubernatorial election in Virginia (fielded through YouGov). See Online Appendix Section F.

While attack ads may be more interesting or engaging on average, it is not clear that such characteristics should be treated as inherent to tone rather than as distinct dimensions. If separable, at least some the negativity effect could be attributable to how interesting the information is, rather than the tone itself.

Voters observe party cues from media they passively or actively consume, and then decide to tune in or out given these features, in order to avoid cognitive dissonance from information that conflicts with core aspects of their political identity (Jerit and Barabas 2012; Theodoridis 2012a).

We surveyed leading scholars (as determined by publications on the topic) to gauge their baseline expectations about voter ad consumption. (Details of this survey are available in the Online Appendix.) Among the 62 scholars surveyed, 57% expect rates of skipping to be higher for positive ads, while 15% expect rates to be higher for negative ads and 29% thought there will be no difference. 71% of experts believe ads from the opposing party will elicit more skipping, while 16% expect voters will skip more ads aired by their own party, with 13% stating no difference. The scholars in our survey expect negative ads to elicit greater self-exposure than positive ads; they expect more ad-seeking behavior from respondents presented with in-party ads; and while they expect both tone and source to influence behavior, they expect the impact of party source to be more pronounced.

We also fielded a similar study through YouGov on a sample ($N=1200$) of Virginians in the days prior to that Commonwealth’s 2013 Gubernatorial election. Details of that study can be found in the Online Appendix. In the interest of space, we do not highlight those results here, as they largely corroborate the findings in our national sample.

Following Mutz (2011) and Miratrix et al. (2017), we do not use survey weights provided by YouGov in our analysis. Not all subjects could watch video in the CCES, and weights are generated for the entire sample, not just this subset. Online recruitment by YouGov potentially over-samples the politically engaged, which could somewhat limit the generalizability of our results. For instance, we might uncover lower skipping rates than observed in the broader electorate, or might understate tone effects, if negativity impacts the least politically interested the most. The sample is diverse and broadly representative without weights, and our findings do not differ when using weights.

Though the selected ads are very similar, they are not identical on all non-experimental dimensions. Yet, we use actual, as opposed to hypothetical ads, to maximize the realism and external validity of our experimental findings, which we think outweighs concerns about the slight heterogeneity across treatments.

For robustness, we ran our analyses iteratively excluding each ad, and find no evidence of ad-specific effects. We also ran analyses excluding the outside-group ads “Briefcase” and “It’s OK”, and including an indicator for candidate or outside-group sponsored ad, again recovering identical results.

Dial testing data in Iyengar et al. (2010) suggests that subjects generally are able to discern the source and tone of ads within the first few seconds. In our sample, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney appeared in voice, image or name within the first second or two of every ad. In every negative ad, a clear line of attack is made within the first 5 or 6 s, accompanied by negative music, voiceovers and images. Four of the six positive ads open with the candidates speaking either to the camera or to supporters in rallies, alongside applause and uplifting music. The remaining Obama ad opens with photos of the President as a child with his mother going to school and growing up, and the final Romney ad opens with him talking about his character and leadership with workers on a factory floor. The videos used can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/ccesvideos/.

We also recorded the time spent on the screen following the video page to make sure respondents did not leave their computers while completing the survey.

We descriptively assess effect heterogeneity in downstream behaviors, stratifying on skippers and non-skippers, in Tables 6 and 7 in the Online Appendix.

We also examine skipping using a 25-s cut-off, and recover similar findings indicating our results are not driven by individuals skipping at the final seconds.

The 5-s ad skipping feature is extensively used by YouTube, allowing viewers to reach media content after only brief exposure to ads. Many online sources similarly allow viewers to skip ad content, and online television providers (e.g., Hulu) give viewers discretion to choose the amount and type of ads they watch.

Viewing times are shown in density plots in Figs. 1 and 3. A few subjects watched the video for longer than their duration, due to slight variations in connection speed for streaming video. The rarity of these longer views results from features of YouGov’s survey system designed to optimize video streaming. Since treatment assignment is random, there is no reason to expect differences in connection speed across conditions.

Due to non-linearity in modeling binomial outcomes, we replicate results using logit model, and recover virtually identical results. See Tables 2 and 3 in the Online Appendix.

We recover virtually identical findings using ks-tests when comparing how long participants watched positive and negative ads.

Our findings clearly contrast with Berger and Milkman (2011), who examine whether particular types of positivity or negativity influence the information people share online. A possible reason for the divergent results is that our study uses a large-N survey experiment to measure how people respond to policy or character attacks made in partisan presidential advertisements, while Berger and Milkman (2011) analyze responses to an amusing Jimmy Dean sausage commercial ($N=49$), an angry story about bad customer service by United Airlines ($N=45$), and a sad story about 9/11 victims ($N=47$). None of these latter vignettes prime partisanship, and they focus on particular emotional dimensions of tone, rather than on attack or promotion politics.

We also assess whether tone influences ad-seeking behavior differently for certain respondents, in particular the most (or least) interested in current events (Baum 2002). In our auxiliary, multivariate models, we interact interest with (randomized) ad tone, to account for any conditional effects. We recover null interaction effects for all of ad-seeking outcomes, suggesting tone does not influence exposure depending on political interest. See Tables 2 and 3 in the online Appendix.

Auxiliary OLS results presented in Table 4 in the Appendix show that an ad’s interestingness does not increase exposure to it overall, or conditional on tone. Between 20 and 40% of respondents rated ads in our sample as interesting. For comparison, the Vanderbilt Ads Project rated a larger sample of 2012 Presidential ads using an identical survey instrument, and found virtually all of these range between 34 and 41% (Geer 2012a). Both findings suggest that our results are unlikely to be idiosyncratic to the particular ads we studied.

We also assess whether prior (reported) exposure to ads outside the experiment is attenuating ad-seeking behaviors, especially by tone. We ask respondents whether they previously had seen the ad shown to them, and aggregate this to measure overall exposure to each ad. Of course, this measure could be influenced by factors that vary across the ads, rather than outside exposure, though again we sought to make ads as similar (and as similarly interesting) as possible to minimize such concerns. Nevertheless, we find that respondents were equally likely to report being exposed to positive (43%) and negative (42%) ads in our sample. We present additional auxiliary regression results in Table 5 in the Online Appendix, using this measure to assess what impact prior exposure has on ad-seeking in our experimental frame. Previous viewing dampens self-exposure to ads in our study, but this effect is statistically similar for both positive and negative ads. In combination, these two results strongly suggest that outside exposure to the sample ads is unlikely to have any mediating effect on how ad tone impacts self-exposure.

Pure independents appear to behave somewhat more like Republicans, perhaps hinting at the composition of that group in this particular electoral context. See Section E.1 in the Appendix for more details.

Figure 12 in the Online Appendix show ad-seeking choices by ad type (tone and source) and respondent PID. Interestingly, a fair number of Republicans (49%) and Democrats (55%) completely watch out-party ads. We do not find that these partisan identifiers are more moderate or cross-pressured on the issues, but do find they are more interested in politics and consume more news media.

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Titel: Seeing Spots: Partisanship, Negativity and the Conditional Receipt of Campaign Advertisements
verfasst von: John A. Henderson
Alexander G. Theodoridis
Publikationsdatum: 17.10.2017
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 4/2018
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9432-6

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