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expends considerable time, effort, and favors to raise money to broadcast political
commercials. Similarly, for the candidate who is a target of her opponent’s issue attack
ad, it is important to learn if the messages disseminated pose any harm to her candidacy.
What electoral benefits does a candidate derive from attacking his opponent? Do attack
ads leave citizens’ more informed, uninformed, or misinformed about the targeted
candidate’s issue positions and ideological position? Hence, this research seeks to
understand the electoral consequences of candidates’ issue advertising for the outcome of
contemporary elections to the House of Representatives.
The analysis conducted here is admittedly limited, it cannot examine whether
candidates’ issue advertisements inform citizens about the position of the candidate for
the issue that is the subject of the ad. However, it can tell us to what extent these ads
inform, fail to inform, or misinform citizens about candidates’ ideological positions.
Candidates’ ideological orientations represent an important component to the complex
calculus of voter decision-making in House election, and one that figures prominently in
theories of representation (Ansolabahere, Snyder, and Stewart, 2001; Jacobson, 1997;
Wright and Erikson, 1997). By understanding the consequences of candidates’ issue
advertisements for citizens’ certainty and knowledge of candidates’ ideological
orientations we will be in a better place to evaluate campaign advertisings’ role in
representative democracy.
I begin by generating hypotheses for the impact of candidates’ political
advertisements on citizens’ certainty and accuracy of these same candidates’ ideological
orientations. The influence of candidates’ issue advertisements on citizens’ perceptual
certainty of the targeted candidates’ ideological orientation represents one perspective on
Convention