THE EFFECT OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING

We noted above the importance of distinguishing between types of political communication, such
as election broadcasts and TV news interviews. If the candidates image and personality (as
perceived by the audience) is an important factor in shaping voting behavior so too arguably, is
the partys political advertising. As we shall see in Chapter 6, advertising is a major component
of modern political communication, consuming huge financial and creative resources during and
between elections. The fact of parties expenditure on advertising might be thought to point to
evidence that it works in shaping behavior. Such evidence is, however, conspicuously lacking.
Research cited by Diamond and Bates supports t6he use and gratification thesis that the effects
of political advertising (in which category we include British pretty political broadcasts) are
heavily conditioned by the existing political attitudes of the audience. They note that some
supporters of a particular candidate tent to project their views on to the candidates advertisingthey will hear what they want to hear, almost regardless of what the favored candidate says. A
number of studies have concluded that few people actually change votes due to political
advertising (1984, p.351). Advertising, these authors suggest, may reinforce existing political
attitudes and behavior patterns, nut will rarely change them. Cundy discusses research suggesting
that effect of political advertising are in inverse proportion to the audiences knowledge of the
party or candidate being advertised, and that once a candidates image has been developed, new
information is unlikely to generate any appreciable change (1986, p.232)
This is true regardless of the aesthetic qualities of the advert, which failing to improve a partys
votes. In the 1987 general election, the Kinnock- the Movie PEB, as we have already noted,
attracted numerous accolades for the skill of its construction, to the extent that it was shown
twice on television during the campaign (a first for British political advertising). Labours vote
on polling day was not substantially affected, however, unless one believes that it would have
been even lower without the positive image of Kinnock presented in director Hugh Hudsons
film. In the 1988 US presidential election, on the other hand, the republicans infamous Willie
Horton spot, accusing Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, of being dangerously liberal on
crime, is widely behaved to have contributed substantially to Bushs victory.

When all the empirical is taken into account (and there is not so much of it as one might
expect, given the extent to which image-management has become a central feature of political
campaigning) we can conclude that there do appear to be ways in which a political message can
constructed so as to produce a favourable response in the audience. The cut of a suit, a hairstyle,
a camera angle or the colour of a stage-set, are examples of formal aspects of the message which
might, all other things being equal, positively influence audience perceptions of the
communicatorand his or her messae. In other words, tere are good and bad examples of
political communication as judged by aesthetic criteria. Political communication can be directed
and increasingly is, by

Partys campaign and its eventual vote may not be apparent. Despite the famous kinnock the
movies part election broadcast (PEB)s shown during the 1987 campaign and a communication
strategy widely viewed as supervisor to that of the conservaties, the latters actual vote on polling
day was virtually identical as a percentage of the national electorate to figures generated by
opinion polls taken at the beinning to the end of the campaign (43 percent). Labour support rose
by only 3 percent from the beginning to the end of the campaign, to give them a net gain of
twenty seats on the 1983 result (Butler and Kavanagh 1988).
This could be interpreted in several ways. Perhaps the campaign had no significant impact on
the electorate (as opposed to the comentators who almost universally praised it). Perhaps
labours vote would have been even worse without the softening impact of a good campaign.
Perhaps voters recongnised the quality of Labours campaigning but regarded policies as more
important than image and preferred those of the Tories. Any of all these assertions could be true,
highlighting the deeper truth that even objective empirically verifiable measures of voting
behavior (this is how people actually voted) are subject to wide variations of interpretation.