Impression Management, Super PACs and the 2012 Republican Primary

Abstract

Super Political Action Committees (PACs) are new organizations within American politics allowing for unlimited donations to candidate campaigns. Super PACs helped make the 2012 Republican primary the most well-funded primary in American history. Both candidates and Super PACs spend much of their money on televised campaign ads. My study of the 2012 Republican primary expands existing literature concerning political impression management by examining advertising imagery in the era of Super PACs. I developed a typology of performance types from a qualitative content analysis of television advertisements for both candidates and Super PACs. The significance of Super PACs as they interact and overlap with the images of candidate ads calls for analysis of the changing front stage in the political realm.

Beyond donors: Toward a sociology of campaign expenditures

“…Studies of campaign finance can also pay direct attention to the differences in messages created with the money in question (Katz, 2016; Magleby et al., 2018). This makes content analysis a useful tool for developing institutional analyses of money in politics.…”

“…Despite not being legally allowed to associate with one another, candidates regularly have ties to Super PACs. In many cases, these Super PACs that serve as unofficial wings of campaigns have complementary messages (Katz, 2016; Magleby, 2014b). As a result, the legal allowance for outside spenders such as Super PACs to create political advertising rearranges political society and the information that the public receives.…”

Polling, Partisanship, and Promoting Violence: New Developments in Impression Management From Candidate and Super PAC Advertisements

“…In my research on the 2012 republican primary (Katz, 2015(Katz, , 2016, I outlined five performance types, impression management techniques used to construct the character of candidates: the true conservative, the working conservative, the flawed conservative (initially titled the sinner), the saint, and the traitor. These performance types mapped out how candidates and Super PACs designed to support them used political advertisements to construct the images of candidates and their opponents.…”

“…There were also changes in the use of video components and rhetorical devices. First, driving home the more complementary nature of advertisements previously outlined (Katz, 2015(Katz, , 2016 was the use of video footage. As opposed to stock images which were far more common in 2012, Super PAC ads from 2016 have an increased usage of direct footage from candidates, particularly at town halls and debates.…”

“…The involvement of Super PACs affiliated with but not visibly identified as being associated with campaigns, in theory, allows for campaigns to build images of candidates without being accountable/associated with the content of advertisements. Previously, I identified a series of impression management techniques used by candidates and their respective Super PACs in the 2012 Republican primary, demonstrating complementary messaging practices (Katz, 2015(Katz, , 2016. However, since then, a second Republican primary has occurred, and more robust data has been released.…”