Electoral Campaigns

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Electoral Campaigns

• Selling candidates like soap

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Ideal functions of elections

• Choose the best people for public service
• Provide for orderly succession of regimes
• Confer legitimacy on the regime and the
  government
• Provide a means for public control over
  government
• The main source of public control in a
  representative democracy
• Punish the scoundrels

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• Register changes in public policy preferences
• People choose candidates that will promote their
  favored issues and policies within government

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Ideal functions of electoral campaigns

• Inform the electorate
• Test and evaluate candidates
• Generate popular debate over public policy
• Energize system support
• Socialize new citizens
• Education
• Legitimation
• Activism/conduct

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Approaches to campaigning

• Open forum/policy debate
• Marketing campaign

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To meet the democratic ideal, a campaign would

• Engage the entire public in a thoughtful debate
  over public policy, reveal the character,
  ideology and policy preferences of the candidates
  for public office, act as a watchdog to see that
  the process is clean, and encourage the public to
  take action to promote its interests by voting
  and other political acts. If the campaign is
  clean and the vote clear, the new government
  should be considered legitimate.

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The campaign should

• Reach out to all members of the electorate
• Attack the most crucial issues of the day
• Provide a sophisticated and nuanced discussion of
  the issues, providing a clear picture of the
  candidates positions that delineates their areas
  of agreement and disagreement
• Encourage dialogue among members of the public
  and between the public and elites

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The marketing approach

• The earliest significant television advertising
  campaign for a presidential candidate was Rosser
  Reeves campaign for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952
• Eisenhower Answers America

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Eisenhower Answers America
http//www.ciadvertising.org/student_account/fall_
00/adv382j/derrellwilson/p2/politics.html
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• The marketing approach to political campaigns has
  accelerated since that time till now it dominates
  political campaigning for major political office

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The marketing campaign model

• Rather than leading a debate, the marketing model
  sees the goal as selling the candidate
• Product marketing professionals brought in
• The sale is a one-time sale on a single day with
  everyone buying at once
• Communications are meant to convince rather than
  inform
• Winning is everything

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• Decline of in-person campaigning, especially at
  state-wide and federal levels
• Rising costs of campaigns
• Media-centered, especially TV
• Development of political marketing as a
  profession
• Success?

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Undecideds

• The swing vote in elections is made up largely
  of those persons who are relatively ill-informed,
  have a less-developed ideology and are swayed by
  late events, advertising and non-policy news
• They often decide the elections, though, and are
  a major target of candidates
• Going negative can work here

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Political communication

• Advertising
• News coverage
• Press relations, PR
• Debates
• Political parties

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Political advertising

• Televised political advertising is now the
  dominant form of communication between candidates
  and voters in the presidential elections and in
  most statewide contests
• Kaid, Political advertising

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Image

• Parallel to branding in commercial product
  campaigns
• If I mentioned a politician, the image would be
  the first, general impression of that person
• How would you describe that person to someone who
  doesnt know him/her?

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Image development

• General presentation of a candidate
• Must be clear and simple
• How candidate comes across in the media
• Asserted character
• traditional values
• Basic ideology
• Simplified
• Issue stands
• Limited number varying in specificity

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Image

• Should relate well to target audience
• Republicans want a strong leader
• Democrats want a caring leader

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Image

• Challenge opposing candidates image
• Compare to record
• Opposition research
• Identify opposition with disfavored idea

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John Kerry
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George Bush
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Issues v. images

• Most advertising focuses on issues rather than
  image
• 78 of 2000 presidential campaign ads (historic
  high)
• However, the percentage of spots with specific
  policy issue information was much lower than the
  overall number of issue spots
• Vague, general statements
• Claims without context (often misleading or even
  false)
• Researchers have come to conclude that the two
  are intertwined and inseparable

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Emotion and cultural symbols

• Common use of non-rational appeals
• Clearly a successful strategy
• Spots contain an enormous amount of emotional
  content
• more emotional proof than logical or ethical
  proof
• According to Hart one must never underestimate
  the importance of that which advertising most
  reliably deliverspolitical emotion

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Review of presidential advertising
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Emotional appeals

• Winners use more words indicating activity and
  optimism than losers. Losers, alternately,
  demonstrated less certainty but higher realism in
  their spots.
• Ballotti Kaid, 2000

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Issues owned by the parties

• Democrats
• Domestic policy
• Health care, environment, social security
• Republicans
• Foreign policy
• Terrorism, strong defense
• Spending
• Taxes, fiscal responsibility
• Religious values

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Kaid The Television Advertising Battleground in
the 2004 Preseidential Election
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Negative v. positive

• There has been a significant increase in
  negativity over the last 30 years

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2000 all elections
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Positive v. Negative

• Challengers more likely to engage in negative
  advertising, while incumbents tend to be positive
• Challenger criticizing record, incumbent
  defending it
• Attack ads are more common in competitive races
• Most races against incumbents are long shots
• Negative ads are more likely to be sponsored by
  parties or advocacy groups
• Negative ads have more substantive issue
  information

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Goldstein, Lessons learned
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Positive v. negative

• Positive ads tend to focus on the present or
  future
• Negative ads tend to focus on the past and
  express anger

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Effects of political advertising

• One of the earliest surprises in political
  advertising research was the finding that
  political television commercials do a good job of
  communicating information, especially issue
  information, to voters regardless of partisan
  selectivity.
• Kaid, Political advertising

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Effects

• Enhances candidate name recognition
• Increases voter recall about specific campaign
  issues and candidate issue positions
• Some research has found television advertising to
  be more effective in educating the public than
  television news or even print
• A minority of research refutes this

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Effects

• Agenda setting
• Exposure to campaign spots can affect candidate
  image evaluation
• Effects may be mixed due to competitive claims
  exposure

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Effects

• Electoral outcomes
• higher levels of spending seem to have some
  relationship to turnout and success for the
  candidate
• Especially strong for late deciders
• Little evidence of impact in initiatives and
  referenda

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Negative ad effects

• Negative ads usually are more effective for
  recall than positive ads
• Especially effective in generating negative
  attitudes toward opposition
• Focus on opponents issue positions are more
  effective than attacks on character
• When attacking character, focus on competence or
  experience are most effective
• Rebuttals are helpful
• However, may be a sleeper effect
• Inoculation can work

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Negative ad effects

• negative ads do affect voting preferences
• Works more for challengers than for incumbents
• Mixed findings concerning whether negative
  advertising leads to political alienation and
  cynicism

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Female candidates

• Female candidates tend to focus more on issues
  than men do, and to emphasize domestic issues
• May be more due to greater number of Democrats
  who are women than to gender

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• Those who view ads for information are more
  likely to learn and to have their vote intention
  influenced
• Voters with low levels of campaign involvement
  are most likely to be affected by political
  spots

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• http//www.pbs.org/30secondcandidate/timeline/year
  s/1964b.html
• http//livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/index.ph
  p
• http//www.theaapc.org/content/pollieawards/pastwi
  nners/pastwinners2005.asp

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Media strategy

• Targeting
• Costs v impact
• Reach and frequency
• Timing
• Generating free media
• http//www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec04/ad
  _7-19.html

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Quinn Kivijarv, US political media buying 2004
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