Chris Privett
Duke University
The Fuqua School of Business
100 Fuqua Drive
P.O. Box 90120
Durham, NC 27708-0125
Tel +1.919.660.8090
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For Money or Fame: Why Politicians Attack
May 26, 2011
DURHAM, NC -- The next presidential election is nearly 18 months away, but we've already seen potential GOP presidential hopefuls questioning President Obama's citizenship. Does this mean the 2012 campaign will be as nasty as 2008? New research examining negative political advertising says yes, and the data may even help explain why the attacks are happening so early in the election cycle.
Candidates with deep pockets or who are well known to voters are much more likely to use negative advertising, say study co-author Ron Shachar, professor at the Arison School of Business, IDC, Israel, and a visiting professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.
"If there are a lot of money and media involved, then the tendency to add more layers of negativity increases," Shachar said. "Some political pundits are predicting this coming presidential election is going to top previous campaign spending. Our study indicates if that is the case, it is likely the campaigning will be even more negative."
The study appears in the May-June 2011 issue of the journal Marketing Science.
The research results come from an analysis of Congressional campaigns of 2000, 2002 and 2004 by Shachar and co-author Michell Lovett, an assistant professor of marketing at the Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester.
Shachar and Lovett set out to understand the underlying causes of a common political phenomenon: the closer the election, the more negative the campaign. They discovered it's not the fierceness of the competition that determines if candidates go on the attack. Rather, it's the money and attention a tight race draws; as both increase, so does a candidate's negative advertising.
"It's not close competition leading to this negativity, it's the money campaigns have in their coffers and the fact that voters know more about the candidates," Lovett said.
For example, if voters know little about each candidate, the advertisements will generally focus on a candidate's positive attributes. But a candidate with deep pockets or media saturation is much more likely to turn to attack ads, the study found.
Lovett initiated the study as a graduate student at Fuqua, where he developed an interest in political marketing. Shachar had served as chief strategiest for the Meretz party during two general election campaigns in Israel.
"I had faced many of these decisions whether to go negative or not, and I found it a very challenging issue," Shachar said. "Psychologists have determined that in close elections, candidates are under much more pressure and tend to act more aggressively. I wondered if there was an alternate explanation."
The researchers reviewed political advertising collected by the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which records and creates storyboards for every ad shown on network TV and some cable stations. The group monitored the top 75 media markets for the 2000 elections and the top 100 markets for the 2002 and 2004 elections. Positive or negative tone was determined by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which conducts research on how candidates, political parties and social interest groups communicate with voters.
Shachar and Lovett tested their theory about relationships between higher campaign budgets and negative advertising against a real-life political event: the October 2002 Congressional vote to authorize the use of military force against Iraq. Shachar explains adding more positive information does little to raise the opinions of voters who already know a lot about a candidate. The opposite is true for negative information: the more you add, the more significant it becomes in the minds of voters.
The members of Congress whose districts were opposed to the war in Iraq and ultimately voted against their party on military action were perceived positively in their districts. More than one-third of the ads produced by these representatives in their subsequent Congressional races were negative, compared with 16 percent among those who voted with their party.
Shachar received funding from the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel.
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