Turns out there is a good reason for forcing candidates to add the disclaimers, and that reason is accountability. Politicians have been taking pot shots at each other since basically, forever.
Fast forward nearly years and while the attacks are less brazen sort of , figuring out exactly who was launching the attack was often still a mystery. The ad was little more than a mugshot of a black man, William Horton, a convicted murderer who was allowed out of prison as part of a weekend furlough program. Horton later fled and committed more crimes.
As attacks go, this one was devastating for Michael Dukakis, even though Dukakis inherited the program from his Republican predecessor.
When the Hell Did "I Approve This Message" Become a Thing?
The ad was also widely criticized as a racist dog whistle for white suburban voters. Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden was also on the receiving end of anonymous attacks during his campaign Senate. Wyden ended up winning that election and when he got to Washington D. So stand by your ad became law and people started hearing the disclaimers during the presidential election.
Hall-Jamieson said campaigns quickly found new ways to obscure precisely who is approving what. One trick was to simply put the disclaimer at the top of the ad.
How the 'I approve' tagline boosts nasty political ads
What they found is that although the tagline did not consistently change people's reaction to positive ads or ad hominem attacks, the tagline did give a clear boost to the policy-based attack ads. In addition, people had a more favorable view of candidates running negative ads when the tagline was included.
The researchers found the same pattern in a second experiment using ads they wrote themselves, which allowed them to more precisely control for the ads' content. The effect was substantial: Across all their experiments, the researchers found that the tagline had an even stronger effect than did partisanship. It is remarkable that mandatory endorsements can have effects that are at least as large," they wrote in their paper.
Critcher cautioned, however, that the effect may sound exaggerated, because participants were not generally familiar with the candidates in the ads, and most ads, designed for broad appeal, don't state candidates' party affiliation. Still, given the closeness by which many races are decided, campaigns invest heavily in turnout operations that have much smaller effects, he noted.
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The researchers were also surprised when they began parsing out why the tagline works. Do voters not realize the tagline is simply required of all ads?
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Does it confuse them into thinking regulators have vetted the ads' content? They ran two more experiments with large sample sizes people and people and found that even when participants were told the tagline was required by law, and that no regulators had vetted the content's veracity, they still said the ads that included a tagline were more believable. Participants also were largely unaware of the tagline's effect: Even those who said that it didn't influence their evaluation of the ad were indeed influenced by it.
The researchers were able to invent brand new taglines which they had voice actors deliver , attach them to ads, and tell participants that the law required candidates to deliver the tagline.
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They observed the same boost to ad credibility. That gave a legitimating halo to the message as a whole. Critcher and Jung close their paper by considering whether the tagline should be ditched altogether. Although they didn't find a perfect solution, they did find that a more neutral tagline--one that can't be confused for an implicit promise of message truth value e.
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