Mind the Gap? Political Advertisements and Congressional Election Results

Abstract

Do political television advertisements influence congressional election results? We test a hypothesis that candidates increase their vote share by increasing their advertisement airings relative to their opponent's airings (i.e., ''mind the gap''). Using aggregate advertising data over three election cycles, we employ a two-stage least squares estimation with a rank-order instrumental variable, finding that the advertisement gap explains shifts in vote share after controlling for variables standard to congressional election modeling and advertisement volume. This methodological approach mitigates the endogenous relationship between advertisement airings and election results.

Policy Narratives and Policy Outcomes: An NPF Examination of Oregon's Ballot Measure 97

“…While many NPF studies describe narrative elements (e.g., Shanahan et al, ) and some account for the persuasiveness of those elements (e.g., Jones, ), none, to date, have modeled and accounted for exposure to those narratives. We expect that to truly discern the effect of policy narratives on public policy, the NPF will need to take the difficult methodological step of accurately accounting for and modeling exposure (see, for example, Jones & Jorgenson, ).…”

“…Using spending as a proxy for exposure—as money can buy a campaign air time, phone calls, or billboards—and exposure to indicate how influenced a person is by a policy position, one possible explanation of Measure 97's failure is that the opposition campaign crowded out the proponent campaign through sheer message volume output in the final weeks of the election, effectively saturating the communication environment with the opposition narrative (see Jones & Jorgensen, ). While our analysis shows that both the proponent and opposition narratives have similar effects on vote switching, it is plausible that the frequent and intense exposure to the opposition narrative could have tipped the scales toward a majority vote against Measure 97.…”

Microinsurance and Economic Growth in Africa

“…In panel data regressions, RANK is calculated for every year of data in the sample. The rankorder instrumental variable approach has been successfully used to address the endogeneity issue in a wide range of economic contexts (Edwards and Waverman 2006;Evans and Kessides 1993;Jones and Jorgensen 2012;Kroszner and Stratmann 1999;Rummery et al 1999).…”

How Money Drives US Congressional Elections

“…But in the case of the Tea Party, for sure, the Dark 52 ; we repeat our caution, however, that we have not yet fully analyzed the Sanders data for the 2016 election cycle. 53 (Ferguson, 1995b;Jones & Jorgensen, 2012). 54 See the discussion in and (Ferguson, 1995b).…”