Campaigns matter: Advertising effects on potential voters in the 2000 presidential primary

A quick review of political science research on campaign effects in presidential elections might lead to the conclusion that campaigns are largely, if not entirely irrelevant. But this conclusion stands in stark contrast to the behavior of candidates. Presidential candidates wage intense campaigns, devoting millions of dollars to campaign advertising as if their future is firmly linked to their campaigns. Suspecting that the true role of campaigns lies somewhere in the middle of these diverse perspectives, this dissertation embarks on a search for demonstrable campaign effects. I focus on the role of campaign advertising in the presidential nominating contests, employing survey data that spans the course of the 2000 presidential nominating season from the Vanishing Voter Project as well as the National Annenberg Election Survey's Super Tuesday panel along with data on campaign advertising from the Wisconsin Advertising Project. This allows me to incorporate the environment each respondent faces, varying incentives while holding exposure to campaign advertisements constant and varying exposure while holding incentives constant. Applying an information processing approach, I examine campaign effects at several points in this chain: attention, learning, and preference formation. My findings indicate that campaign advertising has a strong stimulating influence on levels of attention to campaigns that often even outweighs institutional counterincentives that should make such advertisements personally irrelevant, that they play a substantial role in educating potential voters, especially those who might not learn otherwise, and, finally, that they help lead to formation of candidate preference. These findings represent the fulfillment of three necessary conditions for campaign advertising to impact vote choice---that the public must pay attention to them, that they must learn something from them, and that their decisions must be affected by them. This suggests that while campaigns may not be quite as crucial to the outcome as candidate behavior suggests, they play a clear and important role in shaping the public's understanding of the campaign and the candidates, and in doing so, may contribute positively to the functioning of democracy.