Page 122 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 115

Through his research on the perception of political advertising, Stevens
demonstrated that the information content of negative ads motivates viewers
to watch these advertisements more attentively. In the case of positive mes-
sages such emotions are not evoked, which weakens the messages’ persua-
sive appeal.
In a similar vein, Craig (2009) observed that despite the conventional
wisdom that negative campaigns discourage voters from participating in
elections because such campaigns lower voters’ sense of political efficacy,
empirical research has proved that the reverse is true. It is negative cam-
paigns that mobilize the electorate through the activation of certain psy-
chological mechanisms during exposure to political advertisements
attacking the political opponent (see also Geer & Lau, 2006; Goldstein &
Freedman, 2002; Lau & Pomper, 2001). One of these mechanisms makes
direct reference to the affective-motivational sphere. Attack arouses anxi-
ety regarding the presented candidates. In this way, it increases the public
interest in elections and in the content of the political messages proposed,
and consequently it increases the probability of voting. The second mech-
anism pertains to the cognitive sphere. When voters realize that an elec-
tion will be held very soon and that the political struggle is fierce, they
become convinced that their vote can be politically decisive. In addition,
these observations concerning the impact of negative political campaigns
reveal the above-mentioned psychological process in which there is a rela-
tionship between a message’s persuasive appeal and the negative affect it
promotes.
Thus it comes as no surprise that negative ads are so frequently em-
ployed in the political market. As noted by Lau, Sigelman, and Rovner
(2007), 83 percent and 89 percent of the ads sponsored in 2004 by the
Democratic and Republican congressional campaign committees, respec-
tively, were negative. The researchers from the Wisconsin Advertising
Project (2008) found that during the week of September 28 to October 4
alone, nearly 100 percent of John McCain’s campaign advertisements were
negative, compared to 34 percent of Barack Obama’s.

Political Marketing Model of Persuasion

As Zaller (1992, p. 6) states, “Every opinion is a marriage of information
and predisposition: information to form a mental picture of the given is-
sue, and predisposition to motivate some conclusion about it.” Many citi-
zens pay too little attention to public affairs to be able to respond critically
to the political communications they encounter. Their understanding of
the world of politics and their behavior are thus based on opinions and