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January 14, 2008Negative Campaign Ads Contribute to a Healthy Democracy |
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From Ascribe Newsfeed: Political attack ads, widely demonized by pundits and politicians, are instead a kind of multi-vitamin for the democratic process, sparking voters' interest and participation, according to a new book co-authored by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Goldstein. "There's this gut reaction that if a political advertisement is negative, it must have a deleterious affect on American politics," says Goldstein. The book, "Campaign Advertising and American Democracy," published by Temple University Press, pokes holes in the prevailing wisdom that negative ads are bad for democracy and tend to suppress voter involvement. The authors analyzed mountains of data, including ad buys, advertising content, voter surveys, and election results, and consistently found that the advertisements that had the most pronounced effect on voters were negative ads. Goldstein directs the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which tracks and catalogs political ads and which was a major source of the data used in the book. He says negative ads are designed to teach, while positive ads many times are designed to play on voters' emotions. Goldstein's co-authors include Michael Franz, assistant professor of government and legal studies at Bowdoin College; Travis Ridout, assistant professor of political science at Washington State University; and Paul Freedman, associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. "It's for the same reason why when you heard there was a fight behind the school in the seventh grade, you went," Goldstein says. "For those people who aren't getting information from the news, that ad can be a shortcut and cue to go out and search for other information," Goldstein says.
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