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The authors are grateful to David Carney and the Texans for Rick Perry Campaign for their willingness to conduct a randomized evaluation and to share their data with us. Special thanks go to Peter Aronow, who assisted with data analysis and manuscript preparation. The authors bear sole responsibility for any errors.
Paid television advertising commands the largest portion of the communications budget in campaigns for the most important elective offices and represents an important source of voter information about candidates. Despite increased use of Internet communications and renewed attention to voter mobilization fieldwork, big campaigns are still essentially paid media battles that aim to persuade voters. Our study addresses two unresolved questions regarding the persuasive influence of mass media campaigns: What is the effect of television and radio campaign advertising on voter preferences? How long do the effects last? After addressing these issues we use our empirical results to consider an important further question: What do our results suggest about how voters process political information?
We analyze the findings of a randomized field experiment measuring the size and duration of campaign effects caused by a $2 million television and radio buy. There are two main results. First, across a range of model specifications, television campaign advertisements have a large and statistically significant effect on voter preferences. Second, and perhaps most surprising, the effects of the advertisements dissipate rapidly. Nearly all previous research on advertising effects has ignored the issue of decay and implicitly assumes that decay, if it occurs, takes place over weeks or months. We find that just a week or two later, the advertisement's effects have all but disappeared.
The arresting finding of sizable effects and rapid decay has important implications for our understanding of campaign strategy and the effect of campaign spending on election outcomes. The results also have implications for alternative models of voter learning. As we explain at greater length in the discussion section of our paper, a large initial response followed by a quick return to pretreatment opinions does not fit well with models of on-line processing. In these models, existing opinions are adjusted when new information is received and then the resulting new opinions are maintained, even if the information that caused...