CHAPTER TWO+

LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1

CONCEPT OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING

EFFFECT OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING

The harsh tone of political advertising, the often controversial techniques employed by
political
advertisers, and the fact that the competing claims made in campaign ads are beyond review,
have raised questions about the goals of political advertisers. Many critics have suggested
that political advertisers seek votes at any cost, even including a degraded sense of public
regard for the candidates and the electoral process. Perhaps the amount of negativity featured
in political campaigns is designed to shrink the "market" rather than increase the sponsors
relative share. Discouraging people from voting is much more feasible than persuading
supporters of one candidate to vote for the opponent. It is well known that most Nigerians
hold fast to their partisan attachments and that the act of voting generally serves expressive
(as opposed to instrumental) needs. Since people acquire their affiliation with the Democratic
or Republican parties early in life, the probability that they will cross party lines in response
to an advertising campaign is slight. And since the motivation to vote is typically symbolic or
psychological (in the sense that ones vote is unlikely to be pivotal in determining the
outcome of the election), increasing the level of controversy and conflict in ad campaigns is
bound to discourage voters from making a choice and casting a vote. In effect, negative
campaigns create an "avoidance" set within the electorate (Houston et al., 1998, 1999).
Although the scholarly evidence is mixed, experimental studies substantiate these claims.
Carefully controlled manipulations of advertising tone demonstrate that exposure to negative
(rather than positive) campaign advertising heightens political cynicism and diminishes voter

turnout (Ansolabehere et al., 1999). It is hardly coincidental that the publics views of
elections and the importance of voting have soured as political advertising campaigns have
become increasingly reliant on negative appeals. In 1960, for example, only one in four
Americans
endorsed the statement that "public officials dont care much about what people like me
think." By 1990,
the cynical response was given by six of ten Americans (see Rosenstone and Hansen, 1992).
Exposure to political campaigns has extracted a similar toll on the publics views of political
advertising.
There is ample survey data showing that the public dislikes mediabased
political campaigns. According
to the most recent surveys by the Pew Center, a majority of the electorate (some 60 percent)
felt that
campaign commercials were not useful in helping them choose a candidate during the 1998
elections and
more than twothirds
(68%) judged the campaign as "nasty" (Pew Center, 1998). And in a recent survey
of voters in Virginia, some threefourths
of the sample indicated that negative campaigns were likely to
discourage people from voting (Freedman, 1999).
Does the fallout from exposure to political advertising spread to commercial advertising in
general? We

attempt to answer this question experimentally, by manipulating exposure to political

advertising and
then measuring participants attitudes towards political and commercial ad campaigns. We
also
manipulate the tone of political advertising in order to assess the impact of negative political
campaigns
on the audiences confidence in political and product advertisers. Our results indicate that
exposure to
political advertising in general and
negative political advertising in particular strengthens
viewers
relative confidence in commercial advertising. People do not assimilate their generally
unfavorable
ratings of political ads to the commercial advertising arena. Nor do they express more
favorable attitudes
toward commercial advertising in the aftermath of exposure to political advertising. However,
because
campaigns heighten distaste for political advertising, the net effect is to boost the relative
appeal of
commercial advertising. Thus, exposure to political campaigns enlarges the contrast between
commercial
and political advertising.

REVIEW OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND ELECTION CAMPAIGN IN

NIGERIA
According to Opeibi (2005): Election periods in any nation generate a lot of interest among
the political candidates in particular, and the civil society, in general. This is because the
destiny of the people and the nation rests squarely on the shoulders of the successful
candidates at the polls. It is no wonder, then that both political actors and their supporters
deploy different persuasive strategies to elicit support and woo voters in order to gain and
control power.
Concerning the candidates, Olukotun (2002) assert that it is important for voters to know
their qualifications, opinions, voting records, where they exist, and personality traits. Of
equal importance is the need for voters to have information about the policies and
manifestoes of the respective parties in order to make a clear choice, One sure means of
achieving this aim is through the mass media. Through coverage and presentation of news,
information, facts, figures, editorials, and other analytical pieces about an issue, the mass
media exert considerable influence on the creation of awareness on that issue (Enahoro,
2010:300). There is also little doubt that political advertising as a means of raising political
consciousness has gained ground in Nigeria. This view appears not inconsistent with the one
held by Tejumaiye (2008:85) who reiterates that even the regulatory bodies, that is, the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) uses political advertising messages to
persuade the electorate on how to vote, though not on whom to vote. On account that
politicians effectively use the media as a mobilising tool, Onovbaire (1992: iii) remarks that
the Nigerian electorate is getting more politically enlightened Voters, therefore, become
knowledgeable about the voting process. They are also less inclined to vote on religious or

ethnic affiliations. This position is corroborated by IIDEA (2000:130) in some interviews

conducted thus: The interviews suggest that ethnicity is becoming a less salient feature in
electoral politics, and that the dysfunctional role of ethnicity in undermining democratic
governance and competitive electoral policies appears to be waning. Respondents mentioned
the results of the 1993 annulled presidential elections and those of the 1999 presidential
elections, in support of this observation as one of the respondents put it: We seem to have
built a bridge of understanding over and above the role of ethnicity in elections.
But elections in Nigeria have not convinced us that the electorate are completely informed.
Apart from the 1993 June 12 presidential election which MKO Abiola was alleged to have
won, all other elections, before and after, are not adjudged to be free and fair. While
incumbency takes its toll on politics on one hand, the electorate mortgage their franchise on
the other. Of greatest concern is election rigging in all ramifications. While writing on
political violence, Doghudje (1992:91) avers that the 1991 primaries was violent-prone. He
supports this claim with the TSM magazines report of November 3, 1991 which had the
following highlights: Acid bath at NRC Headquarters, shoot-out at SDP Headquarters
Doghudje (1992) further quotes what Chief Falae, a leading presidential aspirant for the SDP
said as reported in the Guardian of Thursday, October 31, 1991 that since the October 19,
1991 primaries, Nigerians have been subjected to an incredible replay of election rigging in
certain states, on a scale and in a form most people had thought impossible in our national
politics. Disturbed by this scenario, Late President Umaru Yar Adua, in his May 29, 2007
speech is cited in Onah (2007:174) to have promised Nigerians that we have a lot of work to
re-examine the electoral process so as to make future elections peaceful, credible and
acceptable to the vast majority of our people. I consider this as a major legacy I want to leave
Nigeria at the end of my Presidency: That we conduct credible and transparent election. The
bed rock to which such expectation becomes tenable is by empowering people.

Nigeria is a vast nation comprising multiple cultures. But human development, according to
Tejumaiye (2008:70), scores low as the country is rated 158 out of 177 countries surveyed.
According to him, the Human Development Index report (2005) of the UNDP states that
54.4% of Nigerians live below the poverty level and this deprives them of access to the mass
media. In the case of media men and women they sometimes have the tendency of tilting
messages in favour of given candidates. In the rural setting particularly, where there is
disconnect of people from the mass media, interpersonal communication they rely on may be
distorted if not misleading. Faced with this dilemma, it becomes a political disaster once the
mass media fail to educate citizens about the political process. It is in view of this that we can
conveniently align with Schechters (2004) position, when he captures his American
experience as cited in Baran and Davis (2009:294) that the failure of mass media to inform
the public about the proposals of this years presidential candidates, is, in its own way, as
serious a journalistic betrayal as the failure to raise questions about the rush to invade Iraq.
POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND VOTING INTENTIONS
Understanding the effect of ads on voting intentions, and the channels through which this
may operate, is a challenging task from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. From
the theoretical perspective, scholars have developed models and theories that can be grouped
into two broad categories (Della Vigna and Gentzkow, 2010). On one hand, some papers
show that advertising can have an effect on behavior by providing information to voters about
candidates characteristics. On the other, some studies suggest that advertising has a
persuasive effect, making individuals more likely to cast their vote for a specific candidate
when exposed to her ads, even in contexts in which the ads have no informational content.
Identifying which of the two channels prevails has important policy implications for
campaign regulation. Empirical studies then, not only face the challenge of estimating the

reduced-form effect of political advertising on voting outcomes, but also if such results are
supportive of the informative or persuasive view. These two sets of models deliver rather
different predictions which, however, are hard to test empirically. For example, the
informative view suggests that advertising should have a larger effects on voters with less
precise prior beliefs about candidate quality. The persuasive view predicts that ads may have
an impact on voters behavior even in contexts in which ads contain no information about the
candidates quality. Identifying voters prior beliefs, or defining if the content of advertising is
informative is a challenging task, and generally requires strong structural assumptions (when
trying to estimate voters priors) or subjective judgements (when evaluating if the ads have
informational content). Nonetheless, indirect evidence may contribute to shed light on which
of these models best fits the data.
A large stream of literature has investigated the effect of political advertisement on voting
using different empirical approaches. Some studies, such as Valentino et al. (2004) and
Brader (2005), are based on evidence from laboratory experiments and document large and
significant effects of TV ads have effect on voters choices. Brader (2005) finds support for
the persuasive view, by experimentally showing that, by appealing different emotions,
advertising can have differing effects on voters behavior. On the contrary, Valentino et al.
(2004) presents evidence in support of the informational channel, as advertising seems to
have larger effects on less informed individuals. Given the superior control that well-designed
lab experiments can provide, these studies have strong internal validity; however, apart from
the conflicting results, since they do not involve real-world electoral competitions, their
external validity is rather limited.
A range of non-experimental studies have also looked at the impact of ads on voters attitudes
and electoral behavior, generally finding evidence of small effects, and little evidence
disentangling the channels through which advertising is affecting voters behavior. It is

unclear to what extent these results might be driven by limitations of the research design
related to the choice of the elections examined or to the nature of the instrumental variables
used. For example, Gerber (1998) uses candidate wealth as an instrument in order to estimate
the reduced for effect of campaign spending on voting outcomes. However, to the extent that
a candidates fortune is correlated with her vote getting ability through channels other than
campaign spending, these estimates may be biased.
Huber and Arceneaux (2007) estimate the effect of political ads in the context of the 2000
U.S. presidential campaign by exploiting differences in exposure to ads between media
markets (in nonswing states) that are respectively adjacent to and isolated from swing states.
The authors find that, although ads do not appear to make viewers more informed about key
campaign issues, they can alter their assessments of candidates personal characteristics and,
ultimately, their voting decisions. They interpret these findings as supportive of the
persuasive view. A potential limitation of their empirical approach is that proximity to
battleground states may be related to political preferences in ways other than through
exposure to ads during the campaign, and that, hence, treatment and control groups may not
be fully comparable. Larreguy et al. (2014) estimate the reduced form effects of advertising
on voting outcomes in the same context as the one studied in this paper, comparing
neighboring polling stations with varying TV and radio stations reception, finding relatively
large effects. As in Huber and Arceneaux (2007), the extent to which political preferences
may differ across polling stations with different radio and TV reception may question the
validity of their findings.
Da Silveira and De Mello (2011) examines the impact of political ads on voting in the context
of Brazilian run-off gubernatorial elections between 1998 and 2006. Apart from not
attempting to identify the specific channels through which ads may impact vote intentions,
their empirical strategy is threatened by the fact that other electoral dynamics occurring

between first and second round may interfere with the identification of the effect of ads.6
Martin (2012) investigates the relative importance of the informational and the persuasive
channels. However, the study uses the price of advertising in different media markets as an
instrument for advertising. The extent to which the price of advertising is correlated with their
potential impact threatens the consistency of his estimates.
Other studies have used randomized field experiments to examine the relation between ads
and voting. In the largest of these experiments, and possibly the closest study to ours, Gerber
et al. (2007) randomize the assignment across media markets of $2 million dollar worth of
TV and radio ads for the incumbent candidate in the 2006 Texas gubernatorial campaign.
Combining the information on the distribution of ads with data from daily electoral surveys,
the authors find that ads have a positive but short-lived impact on candidate evaluations. The
short-liveness of the impact of the ads is interpreted by the authors as evidence supporting the
persuasive view.
Our analysis employ similar approaches to those in the existing literature, trying to test both
if advertising has an impact on both intentions, and providing evidence that may contribute to
identify if this effect is better explained by the informational or persuasive views. As
explained later, we will not only be able to test for the impact of ads on vote intentions, but
also if such effect is shortlived, if ads have an impact on the voters knowledge of the
candidates positions, and if the effect is larger on individuals with more prior information
about candidates qualities.