https://www.semafor.com/article/09/24/2023/new-study-shoots-down-popular-democratic-theoriesThe peer-reviewed study, set to be released soon in the American Political Science Review, examined 146 experiments on 617 advertisements Democratic campaigns produced in 2018 and 2020. The ads were tested with 500,000 survey respondents on a research platform called Swayable. The study’s authors then asked independent political scientists to tag the advertisements by elements of their style and substance in what appears to be the largest randomly-controlled test of American political ads ever conducted.
The puzzling finding: Some ads were markedly more successful than others, but there was “no persistent pattern to what worked best,” according to a presentation on the data by Swayable co-founder and CEO James Slezak, who is one of the study’s authors.
— “Popularism” – the obvious-seeming notion that campaigns should focus on positions that poll well and avoid ones that poll badly – didn’t clearly win out in the data. “Issue choice was not a reliable predictor of what ads persuade voters,” the study found according to Slezak’s presentation, which said spots focused on racism didn’t turn off viewers as some had predicted.
— Catering to identity politics didn’t consistently work, either. The “identity of narrators didn’t generally impact persuasion much.” The study also found that “voters of all backgrounds were comparably persuadable” and responded similarly to the same messages.
(excerpt)
