The Impact of Political Advertising in the 2001 U.K. General Election

Abstract

This article explores the extent to which advocacy and attack Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) affected voters’ party preferences during the British general election campaign of 2001. The analysis uses an experimental design that involved conducting “media exposure” tests on a representative sample of Greater London voters (N = 919) during the final weeks of the June 2001 election campaign. Respondents completed a pre-test questionnaire before being exposed to a variety of different media stimuli. Their political attitudes were then measured again in a post-test questionnaire. The empirical findings suggest that, in general, PEBs exerted little direct effect on voters’ images of the main political parties in 2001. However, there were a series of “partial” exposure effects confined to particular sub-groups of voters. For example, for non-partisan voters, “attack” advertising appears to have been less effective than “advocacy” advertising. Indeed, in the U.K. in 2001 there were contexts in which negative campaigning was explicitly counter-productive in the sense that it appears to have actively stimulated sympathy for the target of the attack rather than strengthened the relative position of the sponsor.