Political Campaign Advertising Dynamics

Abstract

We investigate the influence and effectiveness of political campaign advertisements. From findings in communications, political science, and psychology, we know that the relation between voters and campaign strategists is dynamic and evolves until voters' views on a candidate crystallize. After that point, political campaign advertisements are ineffective. We develop an adaptive learning model that relates voters impression formation to expectations about candidate behavior, one form of which (rational expectations), renders political advertising ineffective. We treat rational expectations as a limiting result that supports the concept of crystallization. Our model assumes that voters misspecify their forecasts about a particular candidate's attributes and their campaign strategy. Over time voters can reach a rational expectations equilibrium about a candidate's qualities and discount political advertising. We illustrate the learning dynamics using a simulation. Our simulation results show that under certain parameter values, citizens learn the rational expectations equilibrium and discount political advertisements.