Effects of Political Advertising

Relationships between broadcast advertising exposure and various cognitive and affective orientations were assessed in a survey of voters during a congressional election campaign. Exposure was moderately correlated with political knowledge and interest. Highly exposed voters were somewhat more likely to attach higher agenda priorities to issues and candidate attributes emphasized in the commercials. Personal affect toward each candidate was mildly associated with advertising exposure frequency. Charles Atkin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. Gary Heald is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at Florida State University. POQ 40 (1976) 216-228 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:13:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms EFFECTS OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING 217 Recent research evidence indicates that television advertising contributes to voters' knowledge levels. McClure and Patterson report that about three-fourths of the voters who recalled seeing a political advertisment in the 1972 presidential campaign could correctly identify the ad's message.2 Furthermore, voters heavily exposed to television were more likely to show increased accuracy of perception of candidates' positions on 10 issues presented frequently in campaign advertising: on the average, there was a net 32 percent change in the correct direction among heavy viewers and a net 24 percent change among light viewers.3 Atkin, Bowen, Nayman, and Sheinkopf found that voters felt they learned substantive information about candidates' qualifications and issue positions from TV ads in two gubernatorial campaigns.4 The message and receiver conditions facilitating political knowledge acquisition have been identified in several advertising studies. Patterson and McClure discovered that political advertising had its strongest impact on issue awareness for voters with low exposure to newspapers and television news.5 Atkin et al. showed that perceived knowledge gain was greatest for voters who paid close attention to advertising messages and for those who cited an information-seeking motivation for watching ads.6 The role of message repetition in political knowledge gain has been studied by Rothschild and Ray, who experimentally manipulated the frequency of presentation of brief slide advertisments for several candidates. They discovered that unaided recall increased monotonically from treatments showing one to two to four to six repetitions; for instance, there was 20 percent recall of the congressional candidates with a single presentation and 55 percent recall with six presentations.7 2 Robert McClure and Thomas Patterson, "Television News and Political Advertising: The Impact of Exposure on Voter Beliefs," Communication Research, Vol. 1, 1974, pp. 3-31. I Thomas Patterson and Robert McClure, "Television News and Televised Political Advertising: Their Impact on the Voter," Congress and Mass Communications, appendix to hearings before the Joint Committee on Congressional Operations, Ninety-third Congress, Second Session, 1974, pp. 571-618. 'Charles Atkin, Lawrence Bowen, Oguz Nayman, and Kenneth Sheinkopf, "Quality Versus Quantity in Televised Political Ads," The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 37, 1973, pp. 209-224. In contrast, an unpublished survey of voters in nonpresidential campaigns shows that those seeing the largest number of broadcast ads were the least capable of correctly identifying the political candidates. This finding may be attributed to viewer selectivity or a "clutter effect" that leaves the voter confused by excessive exposure to similar campaign messages promoting minimally distinguishable candidates; see Timothy Meyer and Thomas Donohue, "The New Student Voter and the 'Selling' of Politicians," Phi Kappa Phi Journal, Vol. 54, 1974, pp. 8-13. Patterson and McClure, op. cit. 6 Atkin et al., op. cit. To the extent that the political candidate's name and positions are well known, exposure to campaign messages should not result in marked information gain. In the 1960 presidential campaign, for example, there were increases in knowledge concerning the relatively unknown Senator Kennedy but little changes in knowledge about the more familiar Vice-President Nixon. See Ben-Zeev and 1. S. White, "Effects and Implications," in Kraus, ed., op. cit. 7 Michael Rothschild and Michael Ray, "Involvement and Political Advertising Effect: An Exploratory Experiment," Communication Research, Vol. 1, 1974, pp. 264-284. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:13:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms