Doctoral Dissertation Research: Negative Campaigns, Priming Effects and Vote Choice

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary This project studies the impact of negative campaign ads featuring Latinos on voters' political opinions and vote choice. Recent decades have witnessed an increase in television campaign ads that depict Latinos as "illegal aliens" and employ gritty, menacing images of Latinos. This trend of targeting Latinos is seemingly replacing an earlier period of negative campaign advertising that focused on mobilizing voters by tapping into their fears of African Americans. While much literature that explains the conditions under which these ads are effective, the theories are nearly exclusively built upon campaign ads that target African Americans. As the Latino community continues to grow in the United States it is increasingly important to explore whether these existing theoretical models hold true for negative campaign ads that target Latinos. This research examines the effects of negative campaign ads and racial priming on vote choice using a survey experiment that is conducted using the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Elections Survey. Technical Summary This project employs a survey experiment to study the impact that racial appeals targeting Latinos have on voters' political opinions and vote choice. It aims to test the theory of racial priming by assessing whether this theory similarly predicts opinion and vote choice when the target of these political ads are Latinos rather than African Americans. The survey experiment will utilize a dual-wave panel administered through 2016 Cooperative Congressional Elections Survey (CCES) with a nationally representative sample. This dual-wave feature helps overcome contamination effects that may result from asking questions about race before the experimental manipulations. In the survey experiment respondents will be exposed to three campaign mailers for a fictitious congressional candidate. Exposure to one of the randomly assigned treatments is then followed up by a survey battery that asks respondents about their vote choice, candidate favorability, and support for restrictive social policies.