Does Political Advertising Have Diminishing Returns?

• In Event: Campaign Finance and Democracy: Dilemmas and Solutions

Abstract

Does political advertising have diminishing returns? Political scientists studying the effects of advertisements on political behavior generally assume that they do not, despite the fact that decades of research in the product advertising field show that advertising effects "wearout" over time. Political advertising research rarely subjects this linear assumption to scrutiny despite the fact that the nature of the relationship between advertising and persuasion, in particular, has important normative implications for debates concerning the First Amendment, as well as very real consequences for candidates and organizations airing political advertisements. As a result, in this paper, we carry out a systematic review of previous studies examining the relationship between advertising and persuasion, and replicate the results of two to demonstrate the importance of interrogating this relationship more closely. We find that the way one models this relationship affects whether the results are statistically significant and that non-linear models generally produce a better fit. The implications of these findings are then discussed.

Authors

• Keena Lipsitz

• Javier Padilla