Negative Advertising Essay

One of the most prominent and extensively used political campaign strategies is negative advertising – using the media to emphasize the flaws of an opponent, instead of focusing on one’s own campaign and personal attributes to gain an advantage. Research suggests that the use of negative advertising in political campaigns is typical in all places where individual ideas and policies have the capability to be disputed; therefore they are most prevalent in democracies (Merritt 1984). This makes negative advertising an integral part of the political campaign process and, in turn, an essential component of voter turnout. While mass media was commonly thought to have little to no effect on politics and campaigns, the introduction of advertising through television replaced this ideology (Lau 1999). Having constant access to campaign information, as well as positive and negative representations of candidates, allows citizens to make better-informed decisions when voting. The challenge; however, is brought forward with the empirical evidence in contrast with the current state of knowledge on whether negative political advertising has a mobilizing, demobilizing, or non-existent effect on voter turnout as a whole. Empirically, the evidence shows that negative political advertising has minimal effects on voter turnout. However, this can be attributed to the individual level data, survey data, and field experiments that are used in some studies, skewing the results so they undoubtedly point towards no effect. After close examination, a review of the literature shows that most studies find negative political advertising to have a demobilizing effect on voter turnout. In contrast, some studies, including those by renowned political scientist Joh...

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...dvertising through Conservative political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, to send messages such as “it will be as if Iron county is taken over by radical environmentalists” and “call these anti-mining radicals and tell them to stand up for you and your local jobs, not radical environmental policies” to negatively attack county board candidates who support the removal of mining in Iron county. While the Koch brothers believed that this negative advertising would increase the amount of voters for their Republican candidate, the campaign strategy backfired and favored the Democratic candidate. Polk and Iron county citizens were so outraged that out-of-state billionaires had the audacity to become involved in and try to strategically influence local politics, that they all mobilized together to vote for the Democratic candidate who, in turn, won the election.