Replicating Experiments Using Aggregate and Survey Data: The Case of Negative Advertising and Turnout

Abstract

Experiments show significant demobilizing and alienating effects of negative advertising. Although internally valid, experiments may have limited external validity. Aggregate and survey data offer two ways of providing external validation for experiments. We show that survey recall measures of advertising exposure suffer from problems of internal validity due to simultaneity and measurement error, which bias estimated effects of ad exposure. We provide valid estimates of the causal effects of ad exposure for the NES surveys using instrumental variables and find that negative advertising causes lower turnout in the NES data. We also provide a careful statistical analysis of aggregate turnout data from the 1992 Senate elections that Wattenberg and Brians (1999) recommend. These aggregate data confirm our original findings. Experiments, surveys, and aggregate data all point to the same conclusion: Negative advertising demobilizes voters.

Does Political Advertising Persuade?

“…Ad exposure and candidate preference were unrelated in the 1992 U.S. Senate race in California that pitted John Seymour against Dianne Feinstein, but in California's other U.S. Senate race that year, people who reported seeing more ads supportive of Barbara Boxer were more likely to vote for her and were less likely to vote for her opponent, Bruce Herschensohn. Unfortunately, though, the author utilized no direct measures of the volume of advertising for each candidate, relying solely on respondents' recall, which has been shown to be a biased measure (Anolabehere, Iyengar, & Simon 1999).…”

“…Much of this research has explored the impact of the tone of advertising (whether it is positive, negative or mixed) on voter turnout (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995;Ansolabehere, Iyengar, & Simon 1999;Djupe & Peterson, 2002;, 2002aKahn & Kenney, 1999;Lau & Pomper, 2004;Martin, 2004;Peterson & Djupe, 2005;Wattenberg & Brians, 1999); advertising's impact on candidate impressions (Garramone, Atkin, Pinkleton, & Cole, 1990;Hitchon & Chang, 1995;Kaid & Boydston, 1987); and the relationship between ad exposure and democratic attitudes such as political interest and efficacy (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995;Freedman, Franz, & Goldstein 2004;Martin, 2004;Schenck-Hamlin & Proctor, 2000).…”

Contest with Attack and Defence: Does Negative Campaigning Increase or Decrease Voters' Turnout?

“…On the contrary, they conclude that negative campaigning raises voters participation. This result would come from the fact that negative advertising may have a positive informative effect on voters; Ansolabehere, Iyengar and Simon (1999) respond to this "criticism" in reanalyzing NES data from 1992 and confirm their first conclusion. As for Finkel and Geer (1998), using NES survey data set of presidential campaign advertisement from 1960 to 1992, they find that attack has no negative effect on voters turnout.…”

Radio and the Rise of Nazis in Pre-War Germany

“…In particular, there is a small (and not very robust) positive effect of radio availability on turnout after the Nazis got control over radio. 36 If the mean number of listeners per subscription was between three and six, the persuasion power of German political radio during the campaigns of 1930 and 1933 was comparable in size to the persuasion power of the modern media found in the literature in different settings: 12% persuasion rate for the Fox News Channel (DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007), 20% -for the Washington Post (Gerber, Karlan, and Bergan 2009), and 65% -for the "negative" message, "do not vote for the government party," broadcasted by an independent Russian TV channel in 1999 (Enikolopov et al 2011). particular, the Nazi 1933 election campaign was primarily targeted at uneducated working poor on media persuasion, it is harder to persuade voters to vote for a particular party than not to vote for it, as the latter includes the option of not turning out to vote (see, e.g., Ansolabehere et al 1999 andEnikolopov et al 2011).…”