Campaign Advertising and American Democracy

7. Campaign Advertising and Voter Attitudes toward the Political Process

C H A P T E R S E V E N Campaign Advertising and Voter Attitudes toward the Political Process A S WE DEMONSTRATED in the previous chapter, campaign advertisements have the potential to inform citizens. More specifically, we showed that exposure to campaign advertising was related to informational gains in the context of presidential, House, and Senate races. Still, while ads may inform , critics also contend that they create a toxic atmosphere, turning people away from politics and making governing and accepting election results more difficult. As said by Kay McFadden of The Seattle Times, in 2004: Study after study reveals, commercials for Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry have emerged as the No. 1 source of data to voters. Increasingly, campaign ads also frame how the news media report stories. Depending on how you look at it, the result is a civic-affairs tragedy or a realpolitik adjustment to citizens with less time and shorter attention spans. She goes on to cite communications scholar David Domke, who raises the following question: “We could say ads are the worst possible source, because of the spinning and distortion. Or we could say they’re the modern version of the Greek assembly, where we hear competing arguments and then make up our minds” (McFadden, 2004). In this chapter, we investigate the question: if ads represent the modern version of the Greek assembly, might exposure to ads boost citizen assessments of the electoral process? Specifically, we ask whether citizens exposed to campaign advertising are more interested in the campaign, care more about the outcome 88 C H A P T E R S E V E N of an election, judge the electoral process as fair, trust government, and feel efficacious about their role in politics. As noted, most critiques of campaign ads simply assume that any such attitudinal effects are negative—that exposure to campaign commercials leads to lower levels of engagement and trust. In keeping with our more sanguine view of the impact of campaign advertising, we are suspicious about these claims and put them to the empirical test here. In contrast, we suspect that exposure to television ads actually might boost trust in government and interest in campaigns. We refer to these effects collectively as the system support hypothesis. As with the information hypothesis, such a normatively pleasing link between television campaign ad exposure and attitudes about politics and government runs counter to conventional wisdom. As we noted in Chapter 2, one of the reasons proffered for why so many Americans eschew social engagement these days—expressed as a society where everyone bowls alone (Putnam 2000)—is the negative impact of television. Robinson (1975) called the attitudinal effect of this “videomalaise,” although he referred only to the impact of television news on public attitudes (see also Norris 2000). Mutz and Reeves made the following point in their treatment of the role of televised incivility on assessments of trust in government: More general theories suggesting that television bears some responsibility for negative attitudes toward politics and politicians have received enthusiastic receptions over the years. For some, the root of the problem is the cynicism of game-centered political coverage and journalists’ ongoing denigration of politicians’ motives; for others, it is simply the conflict-oriented, adversarial nature of political coverage. The timing of the well-documented decline in trust toward governmental institutions initially gave these theories great plausibility, but documenting a causal link between political television and negative public attitudes has proven quite difficult. This difficulty stems from a lack of certainty about which aspects of political television are most likely to produce negative attitudes, and from problems inherent in studying media effects (2005, 2—emphasis in original). We come at this question from the perspective of televised campaign advertising.1 Although there is some evidence that “videomalaise” is real and accelerated by exposure to television news (Mutz and Reeves [2005], for example , find that uncivil television debates lower viewers’ trust in government), it is not self-evident that televised political ads work the same way. In fact, one study of incivility in political advertising found few effects of any substance on measures of trust, interest, and efficacy (Brooks and Geer 2007). We will focus more explicitly on the tone of ads in Chapter 9 (allowing us to speak directly to the findings from the above study), but our analysis here C A M PA I G N A D V E R T I...