Does Government Advertising Change Citizens’ Attitudes?

• In Event: This Note's For You: Campaign Advertising Effects and Affordances

Abstract

In political science, political communication plays an important role in attempts to explain and understand individuals’ acquisition of attitudes and display of certain political behaviors. Of particular interest, studies on political advertising and campaign effects have produced a voluminous amount of research. One particular form of government communication, though, has deserved little attention: government advertising. Far from being an irrelevant tool, government advertising is broadly used by several governments worldwide, at the national, subnational, and local levels.
I conducted an between-subjects factorial online survey experiment to verify whether the sponsorship of the ad changes the way individuals process messages. I recruited 1,800 Brazilian citizens to watch three types of fictitious video ads and read a news story about unemployment in order to test whether different source cues (government versus party cues) in interaction with independent information about employment affect citizens’ attitudes. I argue that source cues from government ads can be more effective than party ads because individuals tend to react more negatively toward political messages in which the intended purpose of claiming credit and asking for votes is made explicit.
Preliminary results show that the government ad is effective at increasing attribution of responsibility to the incumbent and improving the ad sponsor’s credibility. Individuals were also highly responsive to the information received from news.

Author

• Bruno Hoepers, University of Pittsburgh