Persuasion and ballot initiatives: how persuasive were the televised campaign ads on same-sex marriage?

ABSTRACT

Initiative campaigns, unlike candidate-centered elections, are efforts to mobilize and persuade residents of state and local governments on specific policies. Previous studies have conflicting findings whether or not initiative campaigns can persuade voters. For issues like same-sex marriage, voters may be even more difficult to persuade because their attitudes may be crystallized. Four states voted on marriage equality in November 2012, which resulted in historic victories for the proponents of same-sex marriage. This led to a belief that the marriage equality campaigns won because of their strategic communications. I examine the effect of televised campaign ads on people’s attitudes toward same-sex marriage by combining market-advertising data from the 2012 campaigns and a rolling cross-sectional national survey. Media markets that spill over into neighboring states are analyzed as a natural experiment, isolating the effect of televised advertisements from other campaign efforts. The results suggest that people were greatly affected by campaign ads aired by the groups opposed to marriage equality, and the ads in favor of marriage equality were ineffective. When competing sides are framing the rights of sexual and gender minorities, those opposed retain an unequal advantage in changing the minds of the public through televised media.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQ
• public opinion
• campaigns
• mass media
• persuasion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A subscription to the Nielsen Group is required to have access to GRP measures, which was cost prohibitive for this study.

2. There are a few counties that are not perfectly nested into a single DMA. I classified these counties to be in one of the media markets based on size. All of the counties in the states where there are market spillovers perfectly nested into DMAs. The issue rarely occurred, so the results presented should not be sensitive to this imperfection.

3. The selection of 1200 negative ads and 1400 positive ads as targets for predicted probabilities was determined by the empirical maximum of cumulative ads for respondents in the CCES.

4. As mentioned, the present study is only able to estimate ITT effects because people’s actual viewing of ads is unobserved. Greater cumulative ads aired increases the probability of at least a single ad being viewed.