Negative Polarity
The effects of mudslinging on the political
process may be more profound than hitherto believed
 Much has been made
of the use of negative advertisements in political campaigns, but until
a UCLA political scientist conducted the first rigorous social science
research into the subject, little could be said with certainty about the
effects of such ads. Applying a technique he had used successfully in studies
of television newscasts, UCLA professor of political science Shanto
Iyengar decided to research the issue in California during the 1990,
1992 and 1993 local, statewide and national campaigns. “We wanted to know
whether political ads are persuasive, whether voters get meaningful information
from them and how all of the negativity that comes from these ads affects
the political process,” says Iyengar, whose conclusions were published
in Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink and Polarize the
Electorate (Simon & Schuster, 1995), written with MIT political scientist
Stephen Ansolabehere.
Previous research on the subject concluded that negative ads have little
impact. But Iyengar, observing that these investigations relied on surveys
and artificial settings (not to mention the fact that campaigns, despite
these conclusions, continued to spend millions of dollars on negative ads),
designed a study both more rigorous and more “naturalistic” than its predecessors.
Rather than taking a poll, the researchers conducted experiments in
two shopping malls — one in Republican dominant Orange County, the other
in Democrat heavy West Los Angeles. Registered voters were paid $15 and
shown a 10 minute videotape of a recent local newscast. They were told
only that the study was looking at selective perception of news programs.
In the course of the programs, however, Iyengar had inserted his own homespun
political commercials. Because the experiments were conducted during the
campaign season and the ads appeared authentic, the test subjects assumed
they were simply part of the newscast.
The subjects were randomly assigned to two groups. During the newscast,
one group would see an ad with a positive message; the other would see
the same ad, with one exception: The words had been changed to make its
message negative. For example, a commercial purported to have been sponsored
by the campaign of 1990 Republican gubernatorial candidate Pete Wilson
said, in its original form, “When federal bureaucrats asked for permission
to drill for oil off the coast of California, then Senator Pete Wilson
said, ‘No’” -- a position presumed popular with a majority of the state’s
electorate. The negative version, now attributed to the campaign of Democratic
candidate Dianne Feinstein and shown to the other group in the research
cohort, simply changed the “no” to a “yes.”
“This allowed us to isolate the negative component,” Iyengar explains.
“Otherwise, one could argue that it had been the visuals, the music or
something else that affected the viewer. But these two ads were practically
carbon copies.” At the same time, because subjects were unaware that they
would be asked about the commercials, the quality of their attention had
not been artificially heightened. “In that sense, our results are conservative,”
Iyengar says.
After the newscasts, the test subjects were asked about the candidates,
their feelings about the political process and, finally, about what they
recalled from the ads they had seen. While few remembered them clearly,
the ads definitely had an impact. In fact, among Iyengar’s most disturbing
findings was that negative advertising drives down voter turnout — and
that consultants intentionally use ads for that very purpose. “Rather than
trying to convince viewers to change their votes, the ads are designed
to make supporters of the other candidate reconsider the decision to vote
at all,” says Iyengar.
The researchers found that ads are most effective when the message is
consistent with people’s preconceptions. They also found that advertising
does help to make voters aware of the candidates’ positions on the issues.
Overall, however, they concluded that the harm done by negative ads — particularly
in terms of increasing voter cynicism, polarization of the electorate and
bad blood among legislators who need to work together when the campaign
is over — renders them a threat to the democratic process.
Iyengar has been marrying psychological research techniques with political
phenomena since 1980, when he used the same paradigm for a study of people’s
perceptions of TV newscasts. He notes that the burgeoning field of political
psychology now includes many investigators who are designing studies that
combine the realistic settings favored by political scientists with the
tightly controlled experiments used by social psychologists. “Political
scientists have traditionally approached an issue such as this by taking
a poll,” Iyengar says, “and that’s very limiting. On the other hand, the
typical psychological experiment on this subject would gather a group of
college sophomores in a room, which has no real connection to what’s going
on in the typical American living room.”
— D.G.
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