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 candidate’s image and personality (as

perceived by the audience) is an important factor in shaping voting behavior so too arguably, is

the party’s 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 candidate’s advertising-

they 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 audience’s knowledge of the

party or candidate being advertised, and that ‘once a candidate’s 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 party’s

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). Labour’s 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 Hudson’s

film. In the 1988 US presidential election, on the other hand, the republican’s infamous ‘Willie

Horton’ spot, accusing Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, of being dangerously liberal on

crime, is widely behaved to have contributed substantially to Bush’s 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

Party’s campaign and its eventual vote may not be apparent. Despite the famous ‘kinnock –the

movie’s part election broadcast (PEB)s shown during the 1987 campaign and a communication

strategy widely viewed as supervisor to that of the conservaties, the latter’s 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

labour’s vote would have been even worse without the softening impact of a good campaign.

Perhaps voters recongnised the quality of Labour’s 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.