1992 Presidential Campaign Television Advertising Term Paper

The answer to this open-ended question was "someone other than Bush." They should have framed the question to leave only their answer, rather than suggesting we were "one unknown dictator away from the next major crisis." "Arkansas 2" gave us nothing to identify with except vague, generalized fear. This "differential reinforcement" (Althouse, Nardulli and Shaw 2001, p. 4) failed.

If these were the only campaign outreach, this would bear out the theory that negative or depressing / violent ads, even when they are supposed to support the incumbent rather than deride the opponent, mostly reinforce voters' existing attitudes (Althouse, Nardulli and Shaw 2001, p. 1-2), and drain resources away from where they could actually generate. If these types of commercials demoralize the American voter toward elections and government in general, we would think the politicians running for office would want to generate positive, rather than negative participation effects. Unless of course we are selling actual products, in which case "commercial advertisers should instead encourage the greater use of political advertising in general and negative political advertising in particular" (Iyengar and Prior, 1999 p. 10).

References

Althouse, S., Nardulli, P. And Shaw, D. (2001).Campaign Effects on Presidential Voting, 1992

2000. Presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30 -- September 2, 2001, San Francisco, CA. Retrieved from www.communication.illinois.edu/salthaus/Research/campeffect.pdf

Benoit, W., Leshner, G. And Chattopadhyay, S. (2007). A Meta-Analysis of Political

Advertising. Human Communication. A Publication of the Pacific and Asian Communication Association. 10 (4), 507 -- 522. Retrieved from http://epublications.marquette.edu/comm_fac/9/

Frankel, J and Orszag, P. Retrospective on American Economic Policy in the

1990's. The Brookings Institution. Retrieved from www.brookings.edu/papers/.../1102useconomics_orszag.aspx

Haynes, S. And Stone, J. (2004). 'Guns and Butter' in U.S. Presidential Elections. Department of Economics, University of Oregon Working Paper No. 91. Retrieved from economics.uoregon.edu/papers/UO-2004-12_Haynes_Stone_Guns_Butter.pdf

Iyengar, S. And Prior, M. (1999). Political Advertising: What Effect on Commercial

Advertisers?. Department of Communication, Stanford University. Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/~siyengar/research/papers/advertising.html

Lau, R., Sigelman, L. And Rovner, I. (2007). The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A

Meta-Analytic Reassessment. The Journal of Politics. 69(4). 1176 -- 1209. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2586117. Retrieved from www.uiowa.edu/~c030111/campaigning/LauSigelman2007.pdf

U.S. Census Bureau (2000). Table CPH-L-162. Persons by Poverty Status in 1959,….....