Turned O¤ or Turned Out? Campaign Advertising, Information, and Voting

We present results from laboratory experimental elections in which candidates can choose to provide informative advertisements and voting is voluntary. We also compare advertisements that are costless to voters with those that reduce voter payo¤s. We …nd that informative advertisements increase voter participation as predicted. However, the e¤ect is much less than found in previous studies of the Swing Voter’s Curse. Furthermore, we …nd that when advertising is costly to voters, informed voters are less likely to participate, are “turned o¤” rather than “turned out.” Finally, we discover that candidates tend to overadvertise, and contrary to theoretical predictions, advertise signi…cantly more when voting is voluntary than when it is compulsory. Turned O¤ or Turned Out? Campaign Advertising, Information, and Voting Two aspects of the American electoral process typically receive considerable attention from public commentators –the turnout rate of American voters and the quantity of campaign advertisement expenditures by candidates. When discussing turnout, a number of pundits conclude that turnout is lower than it “should be” compared to other countries.1 Similarly, many argue that through …nancing campaigns and campaign advertising, special interest groups exert a disproportionate in‡uence on elected o¢ cials.2 Furthermore, often a link is suggested between these two issues; that is, some observers contend that turnout is low partly as a consequence of the in‡uence of special interest groups who provide campaign contributions.3 Testing such an argument in an empirical study of aggregate turnout in US elections from 1960-1998, Cebula (2007) …nds a negative relationship between PAC congressional election campaign contributions and voter participation, controlling for other 1 For examples of statements made by lay commentators as well as academics arguing that US turnout is too low, see Bill Bradley, “We Can Get Out of These Ruts,”Washington Post, April 1, 2007, page B03 and Jerry Schwartz, “How We Choose: The Myth and Reality of Declining Voter Turnout,”the Associated Press State and Local Wire, April 11, 2004. Although recent research by McDonald and Popkin (2000) demonstrates that much of the argued decline in turnout in the latter half of the 20th century in the US was a consequence of an overestimation of the eligible voting population by the census (which inaccurately included noncitizens and disenfranchised felons), nevertheless turnout in the US is on average lower than in many other democracies and did decline in the 1960s; see Morton (2006) for details. 2 See for example, Lou Dobbs, War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business and Special Interest Groups Are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back, Viking Press, 2007 and newspaper articles on e¤orts to reduce the in‡uence of special interests through campaign …nance regulations as in Joe Grundle, “Lobbying and Legislators: Money Talks, Panelists Say,”Milwaukee Wisconsin Daily Reporter, April 7, 2006. 3 Numerous newspaper editorials often suggest such conclusions: Eric Frydenlund, “A Clean Campaign? It Will Be –Next Time,”Madison, Wisconsin State Journal, June 25, 2006 and Norm Steenstra, “The Clean Elections idea would help Public …nancing hurts fat cats, gives voters more choice,”Charleston, West Virginia Daily Mail, November 6, 2002. Note that this is a di¤erent issue from the debate over whether negative advertising does or does not mobilize voters. The argued link we are referring to is that the size of extensive campaign contributions reduces the desire for voters to participate in the electoral process regardless of whether the monies are used for positive or negative campaign advertising because the size of expenditures suggests to voters that candidates are making choices that bene…t special interest groups (and not voters). In the experiments described in this paper, all advertising is positive.