While negative campaign advertisements are equally persuasive when sponsored by independent groups or candidates themselves, candidates who sponsor such ads are likely to experience greater political backlash, according to a study authored by government professor Deborah Brooks and Michael Murov '07.
The research focused on the effects of the "Stand By Your Ad" provision of U.S. law, which requires that individuals and groups responsible for political advertisements identify themselves as the sponsors, according to Brooks.
The study, "Assessing Accountability in a Post-Citizens United' Era: The Effects of Attack Ad Sponsorship by Unknown Independent Groups," is especially relevant in today's political climate, Brooks said. Election cycles are increasingly dominated by the spending of independent groups, and over 90 percent of the advertisements they air are negative, leading to progressively more negative election cycles.
"The increase in independent group spending is certainly driving a high degree of negativity on the airwaves, especially in the recent campaign cycle," she said. "It looks to have been a very negative primary race, which is fairly unusual because multi-candidate races traditionally have tended to be less negative than general election races."
Candidates typically run a lower percentage of negative advertisements than independent groups. Negative advertisements sponsored by outside organizations are more beneficial to the candidates they support than negative advertisements sponsored by the candidates themselves, Brooks said.
In the 2008 presidential election, 9.1 percent of ads had a negative tone and almost 91 percent had a positive tone, according to a Wesleyan Media Project study. Thus far in the 2012 presidential race, 70 percent of ads have been negatively toned, the study found. Of the ads sponsored by interest groups in the 2008 election, 25.2 percent a had negative tone, according to the study. By comparison, 86 percent of ads sponsored by interest groups this election cycle are negative, the study found.
Brooks said her own research concluded that, whether a negative advertisement was run by a candidate or an independent organization, it is "equally persuasive in terms of denigrating the target."
There is no conclusive evidence, however, that negative ads keep voters away from the polls or that they always harm the candidate being attacked while benefiting the candidate the advertisements support, George Washington University political science professor John Sides said in an email to The Dartmouth.
Brooks' research begins to determine how the sponsorship of ads relates to their effectiveness, and the work could be expanded using data from current or past election cycles, Sides said.
When a candidate sponsors a negative advertisement, voters penalize the candidate at the polls, according to Brooks. The same dynamic does not exist when an independent group sponsors the same advertisement.
"Not only is a lot of money going into the system from independent groups, but the information is more powerful than if the candidates had put that out there themselves," Brooks said.
A poll conducted by Brooks found that respondents would rather see campaigns with no ads than campaigns with negative ads, despite negative ads' potential effectiveness.
Accountability is a concern when it comes to advertisements run by independent groups that do not necessarily have reputations to uphold, according to Brooks.
These groups, which may appear in one election cycle and disappear in the next, do not have incentives to be truthful, Brooks said.
Negative advertisements also tend to contain more sourced information that is issue-based rather than focused on personal attributes. While this has historically been true of candidate-sponsored advertisements, it is unclear if this precedent applies to ads sponsored by independent groups, she said.
While there is no substantial evidence that a specific form of campaigning is more effective, campaign activity matters most when voters are not familiar with a candidate and one candidate outspends another by a significant margin, Sides said.
Unregulated campaign spending in the wake of the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision which permits unlimited campaign funds from sources other than the candidates harms the content of political debate, government major Andrew Longhi '14 said.
Congress has a legitimate right to regulate these First Amendment rights, according to Longhi.
The study was published in May in American Politics Research.
