Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments
Citation: David Broockman, Donald Green (2014) Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments. Political Behavior (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1007/s11109-013-9239-z
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1007/s11109-013-9239-z
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1007/s11109-013-9239-z
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments
Tagged: Political Science (RSS), Field Experiments (RSS), Advertising (RSS)
Summary
Do online ads for a political candidate positively influence a viewer's opinion of the candidate? Two political scientists conducted large-scale, randomized field experiments to answer this question. They found that exposure to such ads does not make viewers more likely to remember or think positively of the depicted candidate.
Problem
The Internet has become a near universal method of mass communication. In response to this, political candidates have increasingly placed political advertisements on popular websites like Facebook. However, it is unclear whether or not these advertisements are actually able to influence public opinion.
Design
To answer this question, the researchers designed two large-scale, randomized field experiments on Facebook. In the first experiment, nearly 15,000 users were placed in a treatment group for exposure to ads for a Republican state-legislature candidate. On average, these users saw the ads 36 times. In the second experiment, approximately 25% of 261,150 eligible voters were placed in a treatment group for exposure to ads for a Democratic congressional candidate. On average, these users saw the ads 36.6 times.
Methods
In order to evaluate the impact of the political ads, an automated phone survey was conducted on members of the treatment group for each study. A handful of questions were asked in the following order:
- Whether or not the voter had a positive impression of the candidate that collaborated with the study
- Whether or not the voter had a positive impression of the opposing candidate
- Whether the voter recalled the collaborating candidate's main issues, which were discussed on the ad
- Whether the voter recalled seeing any ads for the candidate on Facebook
- The amount of times the voter had used Facebook in the past week
The last two questions were intentionally placed at the end in order to prevent the voters from realizing that they participated in a study on Facebook before the dependent variables could be measured.
Results
The results of Study 1 show that the political ads did not significantly affect voters' knowledge of the candidates' platform or what they think about the candidate. The same results were found in Study 2, with the exception that a larger percentage of voters did recall seeing the ads. Thus, the placement of ads that support a political candidate on Facebook do not seem to positively influence public opinion of them.
Notable References
Carlisle, J.E. & Patton, R.C. (2013). Is social media changing how we understand political engagement? An analysis of Facebook and the 2008 presidential election. Political Research Quarterly. Forthcoming.
Google (2013). Get out the vote—Google politics and elections ad toolkit. http://www.google.com/ads/elections/get-out-vote.html.
Theoretical and Practical Relevance
There has been much concern regarding the impact of Russian manipulation of the 2016 United States presidential election through the use of political ads on Facebook. Although this paper was written in 2014, it contributes to the public's understanding of how effective political advertisements are on Facebook, and thus the effectiveness of Russian manipulation.
