Page 128 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

crime during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, citing the
release on weekend leave of convicted murderer Willie Horton.
Horton, the ad informed viewers, took the opportunity of his
break from jail to sexually assault someone else. Dukakis’s liberal
approach to law and order in Massachusetts became a negative,
used against him with what most observers of the 1988 campaign
considered to be devastating effect.
Another negative spot by the Bush side contrasted Dukakis’s
declared ‘green’ policy with his record as governor in Boston, where
it was alleged he had allowed the harbour to become polluted.
Successful in 1988 (in so far as he won), Bush’s negatives in the
1992 campaign against Bill Clinton did not prevent the latter from
winning. One ad, for example, highlighted Clinton’s avoidance of
the draft in the 1960s, asking viewers if this was the kind of man
they would wish to see as US Commander-in-Chief. Other ads
referred to well-known Clinton lapses, such as smoking (but not
inhaling) marijuana and having extra-marital affairs. Clinton won
nevertheless, the voters apparently regarding such peccadilloes as
irrelevant to his presidential potential, or at the very least out-
weighed by what they perceived as Bush’s poor record. This failure
suggests that the fears of some observers as to the impact of
negative political advertising on the democratic process are over-
stated. Ansolabehere and Iyengar, for example, state that negative
ads ‘suppress voter turnout’, are responsible for ‘record lows in
political participation, and record highs in public cynicism and
alienation’ and ‘thus pose a serious anti-democratic threat’ (1995,
p. 9). We might just as reasonably argue, however, not least on the
evidence of two Clinton election victories, won against ferocious
negative advertising from his opponents, that the effects of such
messages are heavily qualified by other features of the political
environment and by the voters’ readiness to discount them if they
do not resonate.

A typology of political advertising
As political advertising evolved in the US, political scientists
attempted to identify the main stylistic conventions of the genre.
Based on an analysis of more than 30 years of political spots, one
observer has listed eight types (Devlin, 1986).
In the beginning, as already noted in our discussion of
‘Eisenhower Answers America’, ads were primitive, in so far as
their rehearsed, constructed quality was obvious to the viewer.

107