Substance Use Framing in Campaign Ads: State Values or Party Priorities?

• In Event: Poster Session: Health Policy and Politics & Information Technology and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Emerging Research in Health Policy and Politics

Abstract

How does the nature of a state’s political culture influence how political candidates communicates certain health policy issues with state voters? Partisan differences in how Republicans and Democrats view and communicate health policies, as well as the growing politicization of public health and science, is well-documented. However, aggregate, national analyses fail to consider the important role that individual state political climates hold in how candidates from both major parties take and articulate policy positions. More, current scientific literature has little focused on how partisans view and communicate substance use disorders and related policies – issues that hold greater bipartisan consensus that other health and social policy issues.

While COVID-19 has recently dominated much public health discourse, mental health and substance use crises still persist in the United States. Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the opioid epidemic and rising rates of substance use more broadly emerged as a major public health issue across the United States, gaining increased salience in voters’ minds and as policy priorities for elected officials and political candidates. However, unlike other major health policy issues, policy solutions for substance use disorder and mental health issues don’t clearly fall on partisan lines. While framing of these issues certainly varies based the partisan identity of a candidate, the conditions in a state, characteristics of an election and individual races, and other state-based characteristics also matter for how politicians communicate substance use policy priorities to voters.

This research explores the role of state characteristics in how statewide candidates discuss mental health and substance use policy issues in campaign advertising over the past decade. While political candidates use a variety of mediums to communicate with voters, televised campaign advertising continues to make up a large share of campaign spending and represents a significant financial investment in most candidates’ messaging strategy. While recent studies have assessed the quantity of political advertisements that contain references to substance use disorder issues, little work to date has thematically investigated how substance use issues are framed in advertisements and what factors appear to influence specific frames in individual states and campaigns.

Using Senate and gubernatorial campaign advertising data across five election cycles (2010 – 2018), this study investigates how factors beyond partisan identity are associated with politicians’ advertising and communications strategies regarding substance use-related issues. Using a mixed-methods approach, I analyze the content, tone, and framing of substance use issues in political advertisements, then examine differences in both the framing and level of attention paid to these issues across parties, states, and office type. This work provides insight about the intersection of partisan identity and state culture in how policymakers communicate substance use policy issues with voters. In a time of both increased political polarization and co-occurring public health crises, understanding the way parties and individual elected officials frame major public health issues matters for both future policy debates and what health policies are subsequently placed on state and national agendas.

Author

• Alee Lockman, Harvard University