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Customer Needs and Solutions (2019) 6:49–56

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40547-019-00100-6

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Empirical Research on Political Marketing: a Selected Review


Mitchell J. Lovett1

Published online: 3 September 2019


© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
This article reviews empirical research on political marketing. The goal of this selective review is to provide an overview
of this body of research that crosses fields including economics, political science, marketing, information systems, and
communications in order to make it easier for newcomers to quickly identify key papers and understand the state of the
field. The review takes the perspective of the marketing literature and includes a discussion of data sources, modeling and
methodological issues, and some selected, prominent topics.

Keywords Political marketing · Advertising · Social media · Negative advertising · Heterogeneity · Demand estimation ·
Targeting

1 Introduction future research. We focus on the empirical literature on


political marketing for US elections. This literature and our
Political marketing has become a large and substantively review focuses on measuring the effects of advertising and
important domain of research in marketing. Campaign bud- related marketing actions (e.g., face-to-face contacts, digital
gets and media expenditures have grown dramatically. Pres- and social media) as well as determinants of candidate
idential spending doubled from 2004 to the 2016 campaign, decisions. This review is organized around the data sources,
and House and Senate races increased from US$0.4 bil- modeling issues related to the demand-side (i.e., voter
lion dollars in 1990 to almost US$2.7 billion in 2018. At response), and the current state of research on a selected set
the same time, political advertising has become markedly of empirical topics.
more negative from hovering below 30 % of ads being
negative through the 1960s to the 1990s [20] to increas-
ing to around 80 to 90 % in recent elections [18]. Both 2 Review of Main Data Sources
parties have also dramatically increased their ground cam-
paign using more sophisticated technologies and more field In addition to some custom surveys, a number of standard
offices [12]. Media coverage during this period has become datasets have been used to study political marketing.
more politically slanted operating as a vehicle of party mes- Three types of data are most commonly used—voting and
sages rather than a neutral arbiter of the conversation [14]. demographic data, advertising data, and news coverage data.
Of course, this same time period has seen the rise of social We discuss these and other data sources.
media as a major platform for campaigns to communi-
cate and rebroadcast messages [19]. This environment of 2.1 Voting and Demographics
change provides a rich backdrop of unanswered questions
for empirical work on political marketing. For voting data, aggregations of voting decisions are typ-
This article conducts a selective review of empirical ically obtained from the FEC or private sources (e.g.,
work on political marketing with the aim to motivate uselectionatlas.org) including estimates of voting age pop-
ulation and party registrations. The most common level
of data used in the literature is county. Individual-level
 Mitchell J. Lovett data is available from surveys including the National Elec-
mitch.lovett@simon.rochester.edu tion Studies (https://electionstudies.org) and the Annenberg
Election Surveys. These survey data provide rich informa-
1 Simon Business School, University of Rochester, 500 Wilson tion about the individual and their context. Polling data
Blvd., Rochester, NY 14627, USA provides vote intentions and attitudes and such polls are
50 Cust. Need. and Solut. (2019) 6:49–56

available for national contests (see realclearpolitics.com and the prevalent consumption of internet and mobile app-based
pollingreport.com). Other demographic data come from the news. Manual coding or text analytics have been used
US Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics. One study has to evaluate content within articles or broadcast transcripts
used Simmons data to collect television viewership by polit- (e.g., [15]).
ical stance [39]. Beyond this data used for research, the liter-
ature indicates that campaigns have access to more detailed 2.4 Other Data
data including regular polling data, detailed election district
data, and voter data files that allow more micro-targeting. More recently, social media, field offices, and other
innovative data sources have been introduced. Social media
2.2 Advertising posts are publicly available from Twitter, blogs, and forums,
or available through various social media listening tools [1,
Advertising data focuses on television advertising, where 6, 19]. Such data generally require applying text analytics
the bulk of media dollars have historically been spent by to extract features from the social media text posts such
campaigns. The original source for most studies has been as topics or sentiment. One limitation of such social media
the Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG) at Kantar. data is that posts are far removed from exposures that would
This original CMAG advertising data covers the full USA affect voters.
and includes counts and estimates of costs by creative and Another area of growing interest is the so-called “ground
provides a story board of each ad. campaign.” Earlier work used field experiments [22, 29].
The Wisconsin Advertising Project (WAP) and the Wes- Several recent papers have leveraged data on the placement
leyan Media Project (WMP) use the story board information of field offices available from “Democracy in Action”
from CMAG to manually code each advertisement along project at the George Washington University and other
several dimensions including sponsor, tone of advertising, news sources [10, 12, 41]. Like advertising data, this field
and various other detailed aspects of the advertising con- office data presents challenges in translating counts into
tent. The exact content that is coded depends on the election citizen exposures to political communications. While some
year. One limitation of the coded WAP/WMP data is that it research [10] suggests there is correlation between the
is only available with up to multiple years delay from the placement of field offices and survey measures of contact,
election year and it does not cover the entire USA. the field office measurement is relatively indirect. Finally,
By combining this data with SQAD data on advertis- some other studies have incorporated relatively unique data
ing costs (reported quarterly), several papers have estimated such as facial attractiveness of candidates [31].
advertising exposures. Other studies have measured expo-
sure using simple survey-based approaches [24] or more
involved techniques that fuse aggregate advertising data 3 Review of Demand-Side Model
with crosstabs of viewing from Simmons [39]. Because tele- Considerations
vision advertising is targeted to the designated media areas
or DMAs (geographies defined by Nielsen that largely fol- Many recent papers have assumed a framework in which
low county definitions), this data provides variation over individuals choose the candidate and whether to vote based
time and across geographies. This latter problem is more on the underlying utility of each of the options. The utility
important to address if interested in national election out- for individual i in geographical unit m and election year t
comes. To address these limitations, some studies have used for option j ∈ {Republican, Democrat, Not V oting} is
data purchased directly from Kantar or Nielsen [10]. as follows:

2.3 News Coverage


uijmt = vijmt + ξjmt + εijmt , (1)
Research has also leveraged news coverage data includ-
ing from Google News, LexisNexis (for broadcast tran- where vijmt are characterized by an assumed function of
scripts), and for local newspapers, newslibrary.com. Newsli- observed characteristics of the individual, candidate, or
brary.com is useful in particular for races below the pres- context, chief among these are the exposures to marketing
idential level because it captures a much broader array actions; ξjmt represent unobserved characteristics (the
of local newspapers and is searchable (e.g., [40]). Some econometric error) that are allowed, generally, to take an
research attempts to translate these news article counts into arbitrary distribution; and the εijmt are unobserved and
measures of news exposure, but these efforts require fus- assumed to follow a known distribution such as extreme
ing with other data related to distribution of the newspapers value type I or normal. Typically, the outside utility
[21], and such coverage areas may be less relevant with of not voting is normalized to zero. The individual is
Cust. Need. and Solut. (2019) 6:49–56 51

assumed to pick the option with the highest utility. Under standard multinomial logit formulation, the sign must be the
the assumption of extreme value type I distributed εijmt , same for turnout and choice. Because the model given in
integrating out this term leads to a multinomial logit choice Eqs. 1–2 assumes independence of irrelevant alternatives,
probability, i.e., the expected probability without observing substitution from the no vote and opponent are forced to be
the εijmt . This assumption, the most typical one used proportional to their shares, so that the estimated effects are
in the literature, imposes the independence of irrelevant smoothed over these two effects. If turnout effects are small,
alternatives (IIA), which implies that substitution between but candidate choice effects are moderate, then the effects
options is proportional to their shares. (at best) would be measured as somewhere between the two
The choice of functions for vijmt requires some special effects.
attention for this setting. To simplify exposition, we focus Most papers have ignored this concern, but a few address
on advertising, noting the conceptualization for this setting this partially by using an alternative specification of the
can be similar for other marketing actions. To measure utility function. For example, in [39], two different utility
advertising effects, the vijmt includes a (simple) function of indexes are posed, one for turnout and one for choice. The
the advertising levels, with the most typical function being unobservables are allowed to correlate between them and
logarithm. Thus, they implement the unobservables as normally distributed
to produce a bivariate probit model. This issue becomes
vijmt = αlog[ajmt ] + ṽijmt , (2) particularly problematic when incorporating multiple types
of marketing actions or multiple types of advertising
where in practice, one is added to ajmt prior to logging it to content. In this case, these standard assumptions lead the
avoid numerical issues when ajmt = 0. This functional form different types to have proportional effects on voters. Recent
imposes a particular diminishing returns. Note also that research [28] provides an approach to address this model
for TV advertising, advertisements are placed at the DMA limitation and applies it to study the effect of positive and
level, so that ajmt is fixed across multiple geographical negative advertising. The authors still maintain a utility
units (e.g., all counties in the DMA for aggregate data specification for each candidate, but allow each advertising
analysis). variable to affect both the advertiser’s own utility and the
opponent’s utility. This formulation, for example, allows
3.1 Controls and Fixed Effects negative advertising to both increase the advertiser’s utility
and also decrease the opponent’s utility. This flexibility
The ṽijmt include controls for factors other than the focal allows the net effect of negative advertising to increase
marketing variable(s). Based on research from the political or decrease turnout, while also separately increasing or
science literature, many demographic variables are relevant decreasing the relative candidate choice.
as controls including education, age, gender, income, and
geographic location. Incorporating multiple fixed effects to 3.3 Heterogeneity in the Effect of Marketing Actions
account for unobservables is also common including party-
election year as well as either county-party or DMA-party Most studies have assumed homogeneity of the effects
fixed effects. Following [26], including this fuller set of con- or heterogeneity only across observed types of actions
trols appears to now be standard practice [28, 39, 50, 54]. such as third party vs. candidate ads in [10] and
In particular, the county-party fixed effects are viewed as im- positive versus negative ads in [54] and [28]. Some
portant to control for a host of stable unobservables (partisan studies have tried to incorporate voter-level differences
and participatory tastes) that differ at the county level. in the effects, i.e., αi , but these efforts have so far
not resulted in well-identified estimates of unobserved
3.2 Separating Turnout and Relative Candidate heterogeneity once the county-party fixed effects are
Choice Effects included. This is perhaps not surprising since, to identify
the unobserved heterogeneity, instruments are required that
Although the utility and advertising formulation above measure changes in shares given a change in observables
follows fairly directly from standard utility approaches used that is not proportionate to shares. With the constant
in marketing, it leads to a significant problem in the political choice sets in elections (all major party candidates
setting: The effect of a marketing action on turnout (whether on every ballot), this implies obtaining disproportionate
to vote or not) in political contests is not necessarily changes in shares for the inside vs. outside good.
expected to have the same sign as that on relative candidate With cost instruments or a border discontinuity strategy,
choice (i.e., given that you vote, how much influence toward the useful variation to identify heterogeneity appears
one candidate vs. another). The problem is that in the limited.
52 Cust. Need. and Solut. (2019) 6:49–56

One recent working paper [10] has introduced the idea The research is somewhat mixed on whether endogeneity
of using registrations as a proxy for partisanship and is a major issue in the political setting. Some studies have
allowing the effects of marketing actions to differ by party. shown that though the estimates are meaningfully different
These registrations data serve to define the distribution with and without endogeneity corrections the estimates are
for the unobserved (voter-level) partisan heterogeneity, so sufficiently noisy to not be able to statistically distinguish
that partisanship is drawn from the observed distribution the point estimates [26, 38, 39]. Theoretically, endogeneity
of partisan registrations in each county. This approach has concerns could arise such as targeted spending, unobserved
intuitive appeal, but some difficulties in implementation, get-out-the-vote efforts, and changes in local politics that
including that registrations are contemporary with the the campaigns observe, but not the researcher. Some studies
election and may not be predetermined, and that not all have found that without proper corrections for endogeneity
states require registration or have different meaning to a the estimates are significantly different (e.g., [28, 50]).
registration (e.g., in some states one can only vote in party
primaries if registered). 3.5 Measures of the Effect of Marketing Actions
A broader consideration about incorporating unobserved
heterogeneity is the empirical implications. In aggregate One last issue with demand-side estimates is the presen-
models, the model typically incorporates unobserved tation of the results. Because most models are non-linear,
heterogeneity in order to allow more flexible substitution presenting simple coefficients is not sufficient to represent
(i.e., that breaks the constraints of the IIA property). the effects. The literature has not settled on one approach
Since in US elections races typically have only two major with some using marginal effects [39], and others using
parties plus a not voting option, the primary benefit from elasticities [26], which allows an easy comparison to exist-
unobserved heterogeneity in aggregate data for elections ing effects in the commercial marketing literature. More
is to allow different effects of a candidate’s action on the recently, the so-called persuasion rate (percentage lift in
turnout versus relative candidate share. This is exactly the outcome divided by the percentage receiving the persua-
problem discussed earlier that arises with multiple types sion message) has been suggested as a measure [13]. As
of marketing actions or advertising that introducing own was discussed above, beyond these types of measures, an
and opponent variables is aiming to solve [28]. Note also important distinction for the political setting is between
that, unlike in some commercial settings where repeated the effect of actions on turnout and the relative candidate
purchases are observed, individual-level data may not choice.
provide as useful of information because only one vote per
candidate is possible per individual.
4 Review of Results on Selected Empirical
3.4 Endogeneity of Marketing Actions Topics

Endogeneity of marketing actions is considered a major We consider topics on the demand-side (voter response) and
concern in the marketing literature. Multiple means of supply side (candidate decisions). The demand-side topics
attaining causal effects have been proposed in the liter- include average advertising effects, turnout vs. candidate
ature, and for this discussion we focus on advertising, choice effects, grassroots contact effects, and heterogeneous
which has received the most treatment among the politi- advertising effects. The supply side topics include candidate
cal marketing variables. For aggregate data with a single decisions to go negative and targeting decisions. We then
aggregated advertising variable, cost instruments interacted discuss research on digital and social media as a political
with party fixed effects were proposed in [26]. Others have marketing tool. We discuss the results and current state of
applied the border discontinuity method, which assumes the literature in each of these areas.
those immediately on either side of the DMA border are the
same ([32, 50, 54]). Using a combination of individual and 4.1 Average Advertising Effects
aggregate data, [39] identify the advertising effect through
imputed individual-level variation in exposure within a Most of the recent literature on political advertising appears
media market. This data intensive approach requires that to agree on relatively small, positive effects of advertising.
most individuals do not watch TV in order to con- The marketing literature opened with [26], which finds
sume political advertisements. Finally, when incorporating an elasticity on candidate shares of 0.03, far below even
an advertising function that allows turnout and choice to the short-term average of 0.12 reported in reviews of
have different effects in a common model, [28] use a com- commercial effects such as [47]. While the exact effect sizes
bination of Waldfogel advertising instruments [38], along of later papers vary, and it is sometimes hard to compare
with a double machine learning method, LassoIV [5]. because of the presentation of results, the results appear
Cust. Need. and Solut. (2019) 6:49–56 53

similarly small, yet potentially pivotal to races because races 4.4 Heterogeneous Advertising Effects
are often so close [27, 39, 50].
Measuring the effects of different types of advertising is
4.2 Turnout vs. Relative Candidate Choice Effects also still in an early stage. One key dimension that has
received a lot of attention in the literature is the deci-
Research that allows separate relative candidate choice and sion to go negative, i.e., talk about your opponent.1 Early
turnout effects for television advertising provide two broad efforts tried to establish that negative advertising and pos-
conclusions. First, while early papers debated whether itive advertising have different effect sizes (e.g., [2]), but
(negative) advertising stimulated or harmed participation reviews of the differential effects hypotheses suggests the
in elections [3, 24], later work overwhelmingly finds that evidence is mixed at best [36, 37]. While the body of work
total advertising has a negligible effect on turnout [4, 32, includes lab experiments [2], observational data [24], and
35, 39, 50]. Second, research has indicated that the effect field experiments [45], only recently have studies exam-
of total candidate advertising on relative candidate choice ined comprehensive enough field data with identification
is meaningful, but that the real size of the effect might strategies that are promising for delivering robust findings.
only be apparent after addressing endogeneity concerns In [54], they use data from Senatorial races in 2010 and
with advertising [32, 39, 50]. The relative candidate choice 2012 and employ a border strategy approach. They find
effects are estimated to be large enough to be pivotal in that negative advertising increases both turnout and rel-
relatively close races. ative vote shares, but that positive ads actually decrease
The above conclusions are based on research designs candidate vote shares. The effect sizes are quite small
aiming to isolate exogenous variation in advertising without with elasticities of around 0.013 or 0.015 for negative
experimental variation. In a noteable exception [23], a large- ads on candidate shares and near − 0.01 for positive ads
scale randomized controlled experiment for a Gubernatorial on candidate shares. In contrast, [28] examine presidential
race concludes that advertising in that setting did persuade races from 2000 to 2004 and use an instrumental variables
voters, but that the influence is relatively short-lived. This approach. They find that negative advertising decreases
finding is consistent with the small average effects found for turnout and increases relative candidate share for the adver-
political advertisements that shift voters’ relative candidate tising candidate, whereas positive advertising increases
choice, but not turnout. turnout and relative candidate share, but has a smaller
average elasticity on relative candidate share than negative
4.3 Grassroots Contact Effects advertising.
Other dimensions beyond the positive-negative tone
These turnout and relative candidate choice effects for total are also of interest. Advertising by third-party groups
television advertising are in stark contrast to those for or political action committees (PACs) are hypothesized
non-partisan grassroots face-to-face contact aimed at getting to be different from candidate or party ads [44]. Two
out the vote. Studies using field experiments, (e.g., [22, 29]) recent studies aim to provide estimates of how different
demonstrate that face-to-face contacts produce measurable these effects are. The first [54] separates PAC advertising
turnout effects. Recently, research has used data on field offices from candidate and party advertising and finds that PAC
to estimate the effect of adding partisan field operations advertising had little or no effect. In contrast, [10] find that
[12, 41, 42]. One recent paper aims to evaluate both PAC advertising affects only partisan voters. The studies
field operations and advertising jointly [10]. Despite the on differential or heterogeneous advertising effects in many
field experiments suggesting large effects on turnout, these respects have only begun to address the broad set of
papers based on field office data present mixed results with content differences. The CMAG data provides details of
some studies finding large effects [41], others suggesting each advertising creative, and many features are already
smaller effects [42] and others that the parties may differ coded by the WAP or WMP. Future research can leverage
markedly in the effectiveness of their field operations
[10, 42]. It is not yet clear whether these mixed findings
reflect heterogeneity in effects or measurement. This field 1 Infact, there are multiple categorizations of tone beyond the“talking
operations literature is still early in its investigation of the about the opponent” definition given here. For example, the main
multiple potential empirical issues including measurement WAP/WMP data categorize ads into “promote” ads that speak only
of field operations, the use of such operations for both about the advertising candidate, “contrast” ads that contrast the two
main candidates, and “attack” ads that focus primarily on denigrating
collecting funds and affecting elections, heterogeneity in the
the opponent. In much of the empirical work, contrast and attack
magnitude and operation of the field offices, and potential ads are considered negative ads, since they both speak about the
endogeneity in the placement of the operations. competition.
54 Cust. Need. and Solut. (2019) 6:49–56

this rich data to further delineate the role and effect of would happen under counterfactual scenarios but lead to
political advertising. The key innovations needed to deepen both parties largely targeting the same battleground states.
this stream of work are ways to identify such differences in In contrast, for targeting across television shows, [46]
content effects (see [28] for such an approach for ad tone). find that Democratic and Republican presidential candidates
target different genres with their television advertisements.
4.5 Candidates’ Decisions to Go Negative However, [39] argue that while such differentiation exists,
such differentiation in targets represents only a small
A number of early studies document empirical facts about subset of programming. They argue that if advertising does
the campaigns’ decisions to go negative (e.g., [11, 25]). not increase turnout, but instead affects which candidate
We review a set of studies that make and evaluate related voters will choose, as [39] and others find, then candidates
theoretical predictions. An early study uses a pseudo- should concentrate their resources on the same programs.
experimental survey method where political consultants They demonstrate that candidates indeed concentrate most
choose whether to go negative under various hypotheti- advertising on the same shows, ones with audiences having
cal scenarios [53]. They corroborate field observations that relatively high turnout and many swing voters. Thus, the
front-runners are less likely to go negative than followers, evidence on targeting in US elections supports the idea
but also test between two alternative theoretical explana- that candidates focus on the same voters, through imperfect
tions for this result. One study examines whether candidate geographic or television program targeting.
negativity is in response to the estimated impact on voters
and whether there is additional correlation in candidates’ 4.7 Digital and Social Media Effects
likelihood to go negative [9]. Another study asks why
close races are more negative [40]. That study argues that The Internet and social media have changed the way cam-
close races have more media coverage and more advertis- paigns engage with voters [52]. A number of characteriza-
ing spending, which leads to more knowledgeable voters. tions of the use of the Internet and digital advertising are
Better voter knowledge and larger candidate budgets lead available (e.g., [16, 52, 55]). Several studies have provided
to incentives to go negative and empirically these variables some initial evidence on the effects of digital advertising
explain away the correlation between negativity and close in political campaigns. For example, [30] provides evidence
races. A recent study examines the role of media coverage that banner ads can shift turnout in competitive districts
in the dynamics and competition of advertising tone [15]. (but not other races). In contrast, [8] find that Facebook
They find that media is biased toward covering negative advertising had no measurable impact on even intermediate
advertising and that this media coverage leads candidates outcomes like positive evaluations.
to go more negative and to react to each other’s moves An important subset of this literature has tried to examine
toward negativity (but not toward positivity). As discussed the relationship between social media activity and voting
above, negative versus positive advertising is not the only outcomes, but the evidence is overall mixed or suggesting
content distinction of interest, and studies have considered small effects [43]. Social media effects are difficult to
other dimensions as well, such as which issues candidates measure outside of a randomized control trial. One study
emphasize (e.g., [51]). [7] provides evidence from a large-scale experiment run on
the last day of the 2010 congressional elections. They use
4.6 Candidate Targeting Decisions data from a randomized control trial of 61 million Facebook
users receiving a message (or not) on the top of their
Another central supply side question is how actions newsfeed with 6.3 million matched and validated voters.
are (should be) targeted. The literature has focused The message contained either information (information-
on two dimensions—geographical targeting and targeting only) or information along with friends’ images (social
advertising on television shows. In general, candidates message). The results indicate that the social message had
tend to concentrate campaign resource allocations including a small, but significant increase in turnout of less than one
campaign visits and television ads on the same battleground percentage point over both the control and the information-
states [33, 49]. One study shows that campaigns also target only conditions, which were indistinguishable from each
their ground campaigns on the same battleground states other. The impact on validated voting was largest for the
[12]. Another uses a model of geographic targeting to argue social message with the strongest-ties, but other political
that higher turnout in close elections is due to the campaign behaviors were affected more and by a larger range of ties.
efforts targeted to the geographies where the election is Other studies have examined both the supply and demand
closest [48]. Two studies [17, 27] model the campaign for social media. Studying the 2010 congressional races,
advertising allocation decisions across geographies under [19] provide evidence of both how campaigns and voters
constrained resources. Such models allow calculating what use social media. They demonstrate that the quantity and
Cust. Need. and Solut. (2019) 6:49–56 55

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