Decomposing political advertising effects on vote choices
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Decomposing political advertising effects on vote choices Wilson Law1 Received: 3 February 2020 / Accepted: 14 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper studies the channels through which political television advertising influences individuals’ voting decisions. Scholars are interested to learn whether advertising primarily persuades people to change their choices of candidates or mobilizes people to vote. I find that advertising does both: about 60% to 70% of advertising’s effect is persuasion, and 30% to 40% of it is mobilization. Advertising’s effects are stronger on those who did not plan to vote for a major-party candidate. To decompose the impact into its components, the present paper estimates a multinomial probit model that permits analysis of decisions of turnout and candidate choice jointly in a Markov chain framework. In contrast to most studies that estimate the effects of aggregated exposure to advertising on voters’ choices on Election Day, I study how advertising influences peoples’ monthly voting intentions leading up to Election Day. In the context of the 2008 presidential election, the magnitude of the advertising effect is not large enough to overcome John McCain’s significant deficit, but it potentially could have changed the outcomes of other close elections such as those in 2000 and 2016. Keywords Political advertising · Persuasion · Mobilization · Discrete choice model JEL Classification D72 · M37
1 Introduction Elections are central to democratic institutions. Therefore, public choice scholars have long asked why people vote, how people vote (e.g., Downs 1957; Tullock 1967; Riker and Ordeshook 1968, 1973; Ferejohn and Fiorina 1974, 1975), and how campaigns influence
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1112 7-020-00849-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Wilson Law [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Baylor University, One Bear Place #98003, Waco, TX 76798‑8003, USA
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their choices (e.g., Grier 1989; Lott 1991; Mueller and Stratmann 1994). Candidates and their supporters spent billions of dollars and countless hours in the recent decade to win offices in US national elections.1 The largest spending category in presidential campaigns has been buying time on media outlets.2 The majority of media spending was allocated to television advertising.3 If donors and candidates are rational, massive advertising expenditures must help win elections (Mueller 2003). But, by how much does it change voting behavior? Through what channels does it affect vote choices? Those research questions occupy an active research agenda. For example, Goldstein and Freedman (2002), Freedman, Franz and Goldstein (2004) and Hillygus (2005) find that advertising increases voter turnout rates, while Ashworth and Clinton (2007) and Krasno and Green (2008) find negligible effects. For vote choices betw
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