Arousing Voter Emotions through Negative Ads: How Agenda Setting Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model Shaped the 1998 Election
Negative ads not only are frequently criticized as tainting the American politics but also are blamed of contributing to a steady decrease in voter turnout. After Bill Clinton had defeated Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election, he was asked why he believed that there was such a low turnout for voting. President Clinton responded by arguing that the more negative the ads are, the lower the turnout is (Wattenberg and Brians, 1999). This begs the question on why campaigns would even bother using negative attacks ads to win elections. Empirical evidence proving that while voter turnout may be lower, negative attack ads may have more of an impact on the cognition of voters, resulting in more informed and therefore motivated constituents. There is no better campaign to test this stance than the 1988 presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Mike Dukakis. The 1988 presidential election set the course for a new era of advertising campaigns with some of the fiercest negative attack ads this country has ever seen. Nothing demonstrates how media has oriented itself in regard to negative ads more than the Republican candidate at the time George H.W. Bush “Revolving Door” and “Weekend Pass” attack ads targeted against his Democratic opponent, Mike Dukakis. Dukakis, the then-governor of Massachusetts, supported his state’s “weekend pass” program, which allowed imprisoned individuals, including those not eligible for parole, to leave prison for a day or more to work or go home. Willie Horton was a beneficiary of the weekend pass program and went on to rape a woman and stab her fiancé during his weekend furlough. It was widely condemned for playing on racial fears by featuring a black man’s mug shot and linking blackness with depravity. The “Revolving Door” ad displays a line of actors playing convicted criminals walking in and out of prison using a revolving door, again suggesting the leniency of Dukakis on crime. These ads sparked a lot of controversy as they were seen as being very racial charged, but teetering on an ethical line of utilizing fear appeals for campaign purposes.
The following will explore the components of the 1988 presidential campaign ads and how the Agenda Setting Theory as well as the Elaboration Likelihood Model primed voter cognitions to be geared toward the issues salient throughout the campaign. In addition to an analysis of the two theories, this paper will review a study focusing on how campaign ads evoke voter emotions before finally offering an exploration on the impact of the political campaign and postulate an opposing argument to the demobilization hypothesis of turning off voter interest with negative ads.
Television Advertisement Overview
The two most influential television advertisements of the 1988 campaign were the "Weekend Pass" ad and the "Revolving Door" ad. Supporters of George H.W. Bush for his 1988 presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis produced the “Weekend Pass”. Horton, an African-American man, was a convicted murderer who raped a white woman and stabbed her fiancé while out on a weekend pass from prison under a Massachusetts. Dukakis did not implement the program however it was still in place during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. The ad opens by stating that Bush is in favor of the death penalty. It then takes its turn by flashing up a mug shot of Willie Horton as well as the narrator saying “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison," and then ends to with saying "Weekend prison passes, Dukakis on crime."(Weekend Passes). To this day, the Willie Horton ad is viewed as one of the most racially discordant political ads in history due to the fact is attempted to tap into white fear and stereotypes of African-Americans as criminals.
The “Revolving Door” ad focuses on the same Massachusetts furlough program in relation to Willie Norton. The commercial depicts a line of convicted criminals walking in and out of a prison through a revolving door. The narration goes on to say that Dukakis was against a mandatory minimum sentencing for drug dealer as well as the use of the death penalty, and that he was in favor of weekend passes for first-degree murderers. The narration points out that “many” convicted criminals in the furlough program committed kidnaps and rapes and were never found afterward. The ad finishes with the tagline "Now Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America what he's done for Massachusetts. America can't afford that risk."(Revolving Door).
Agenda Setting Theory
When choosing a theoretical lens to best diffuse the components of this ad, the first theory to discuss should be Agenda Setting Theory. Walter Lippmann first discussed agenda Setting Theory in 1922 in his book Public Opinion. However Max McCombs and Donald Shaw, who narrowed the scope of the theory to focus more on communication phenomena, formalized the theory in 1972 through studying the phenomena in the 1968 presidential race. Agenda setting theory lays out how the mass media influences audiences to take a particular issue and make it a public agenda. The theory expands on the connection between mass media’s emphasis on the issue and the public’s attributions to the issue (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). It is important to stress that empirical studies show that the media don’t necessarily tell the public what to think, but do a great job at telling the public what to think about (Cohen, 1963). The theory consists of three agendas influencing one another. The first agenda being the media agenda, which consists of topics addressed by media sources on television, radio, and newspapers. The second agenda being public agenda, which consists of topics that the public believes to be of importance. The final component is the policy agenda, which consists of issues that policy makers believe to be important (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). Each of these agendas is viewed as a dependent variable in a causal equation (Miller, 2007). For instance, policy makers indicated that crime was an important topic created the “Weekend Pass” ad. The media then also framed that crime was a key issue for publics to consider during the voting process. The Bush campaign accomplished this by keeping crime as one of the central issues of his campaign, leading publics to believe that is was a central issue the country needed to deal with.
Elaboration Likelihood Model
In addition to Agenda Setting Theory, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) offers a convincing perspective on the persuasive appeals that publics consider when making decisions. Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, two social psychologists developed the ELM in 1986. Their model starts by making the assumption that individuals have a desire to have correct attitudes. However there are two routes those individuals could take to come to a conclusion on accepting or rejecting a message (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). The first route is the central route; in the central route, an individual takes a lengthy amount of time to contemplate the message they have received by dissecting the message as well as taking the time to understand the opposing arguments. It is inferred individuals who are examining the message in this thorough way are generating many thoughts in which to elaborate on. The central route is often viewed in contrast to the peripheral route; in the peripheral route, individuals are seen as not taking very much time to generate thoughts on the message presented to them, but rather focus on cues in the persuasion environment to determine if the message will be accepted or rejected. The environmental cues are not structured based on the logical elements of the message, but rather by its attractiveness. The two largest factors in the model, motivation and ability, play a key role in predicting which route an individual will take. Motivation deals primarily with whether or not the message content has significant personal relevance to the message receiver. Ability focuses on whether or not the individual even has the capacity to keep elaborating on the message. The “Revolving Door” ad persuasive appeal is heavily aligned with an individual taking the peripheral route of persuasion. The campaign ad begins its evaluation in the ELM by asking the individual viewers of the ad if they are first motivated to process the message. Since the good majority of individuals viewing the ad are Americans, there is a good chance they are motivated to care about their personal responsibility to care about crime in America. Next, the individual must decide if they have the ability to further process the message. Individuals vary here based on their intelligence, education, prior knowledge, or just simply the distractions that would allow them to completely understand the message. This is where many individuals make the transition from the central route to the peripheral route. If any individual does not have the ability to analyze all the legislation that Dukakis had no hand in in relation to the furlough program for Massachusetts’s prisons, they are likely to accept the negative appeal of the ad based on the attractiveness that Bush would eliminate worries of convicts stabbing and raping people when out on a “weekend pass”
Evoking Emotion in Campaign Ads
In 1992, Lynda Lee Kaid, Chris Leland, and Susan Whitney set out to understand the effect of the 1988 presidential campaigns on voter evaluations of candidates. They had hypothesized based off of experimental evidence that exposure to campaign commercials positively affects cognitions of that candidate. Research had prior established that television viewing produces emotional reaction in the brain in a similar manner that real events do and that emotion can also be reached through advertisements. The researchers conducted a between-group experiment among 112 students from a Southwestern university in the United States where two groups viewed three Bush ads, two groups viewed three Dukakis ads, and two groups viewed both Bush and Dukakis ads. This study began with a pre-test to evaluate attitudes of the candidates going before viewing the ads in the lab to control for the confounding effect of partisan identification. Participants in the study were surveyed after viewing the ads in the order of positive ad, negative ad, and positive ad based on a 100 point “feeling thermometer” as well as a 3 point scale for emotional feeling (a lot, a little, not at all) and a 7 point semantic differential scale (e.g. qualified-unqualified). While the experiment provided mixed results for the hypotheses, it yielded a very interesting perspective for how viewers depicted the individual candidates. Bush’s scores increased and were viewed as having a positive image even when individuals were exposed to his opponent’s message. The Dukakis group proved no statistically significant change in attitude (Kaid, et al, 1992). Some campaign experts have attributed this to better production value of the Bush campaign ads. The biggest takeaway from this study was that emotions that the ads were able to evoke considerably impacted the image of the candidate. The results also suggest that political campaigns may not be decided based off of that candidates policy stance or platforms, but rather by emotional appeals. Across all groups, Bush was able to evoke feelings of optimism, confidence, security, and minimized fear (Kaid, et al, 1992). These results advocate for the success of the utilization of the ELM.
Conclusion
In 1988, a CBS News poll had asked survey participants which political ads made the biggest impression on them. By a landslide, viewers chose the “Revolving Door” the top ad. With research at the time suggesting that candidates who utilized attack ads end up demobilizing voters and decrease voter turnout, how was such a negative ad campaign by Bush able to land him 315 more electoral votes than Dukakis? Bush’s “Revolving Door” ad echoed current fears of law and order as on of the biggest problems facing America at the time. In July of 1988, 23% of surveyed Americans believed that Bush was tough on crime. By October of that same year, that number had risen to 61% (CBS/New York Times Poll, 1989). In the scope of agenda setting, interesting results surfaced based on personal demographics. However the most significant difference was based on voter sex. Bush’s toughest effects on agenda setting were how women viewed crime after seeing the “Revolving Door” ad. After viewing the commercial, woman became significantly more likely than men to cite crime as a key election issue (Hershey, 1989). When asked about the “Weekend Passes” ad, Susan Estrich, campaign manager for Dukakis, said “The symbolism was very powerful…you can’t find a stronger metaphor, intended or not, for racial hatred in this country than a black man raping a white woman….I talked to people afterward….Women said they couldn’t help it, but it scared the living daylights out of them.”
It’s no surprise that a country plagued by fear of crime was motivated to get out to the polls to exercise the right to vote. Because of the contagious fear of crime that spread across the nation, the demobilization hypothesis may not be the most up to date perspective on the effect of negative ad campaigns. This presents publics with an opposing perspective that negative ad campaigns actually increase voter turnout: stimulation hypothesis. Stimulation hypothesis central tenant is that negative ads provide more information than positive ones in terms of making political decisions, in turn increasing interest in a campaign and increase the likelihood of voting (Finkel and Geer, 1998). Based on the messages of his campaign, Bush was successful in getting voters to first consider crime as the top issue facing the country (Agenda Setting Theory) and then went on to generate ads focused on emotional appeals that were concentrated on having voters decide based on a gut feeling (ELM). While some argue that such appeals in the severity of 1988 presidential election posed ethical concerns, the analysis of the negative ads and results of the election provides future campaigns with a framework on how to not only motivate publics to vote, but how to get them thinking about the desired topics and the best persuasive tools to accept those arguments.