Honor Culture and U.S. Political Campaign Advertising

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

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized regional differences in honor culture in the United States, i.e., that people in the North and South are differently sensitive to reputational threats and that those in the South may be more prone to violence. However, little has been done to evaluate the implications of honor culture for political life. We examine whether honor culture affects political discourse, generally, and campaign advertising, in particular. Given the culture of honor literature, we expect attack advertising to be higher in the South than in the North. However, as insults against women are considered particularly offensive in honor cultures, we hypothesize that the prevalence of attack advertising is lower in the South than in the North when one of the candidates is female. Combined with differential coverage of men and women running for office and the ways that men and women are perceived differently even when using similar campaign strategies, these trends could reify gender biases in voters’ perceptions of candidates and in their decision-making at the polls.

This paper evaluates these dynamics using data on political advertisements run in the 2012, 2014, and 2016 House and Senate elections from the Wesleyan Media Project. It also incorporates a measure of Scottish settlement history, allowing for an analysis of the role of cultural heritage in these relationships. In so doing, this paper creates a framework for future study on the way that honor culture might color campaign strategies, media coverage, and voter reactions. We find that the relationship between the gender pairing of the candidates in an election and the presence of attack ads and negativity in campaign advertising depends on whether the campaign takes place in the South, and that both attacks and negativity are less likely in the South when a woman is running for office. These results imply that culture has staying power, the influence of which may extend to the nature of political campaign strategies today.

Authors

• Lizzie Martin, University of Pennsylvania

• Yphtach Lelkes, University of Pennsylvania