CHAIN REACTION MODEL OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING EFFECTS: ADVERTISING CONTENT, MEMORY, AND CANDIDATE EVALUATION By FENG SHEN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2008 1 © 2008 Feng Shen 2 To my family 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to many people in my completion of this dissertation and all the thanks I express herein are meager substitutes for the gratitude and appreciation I owe. Heartfelt thanks go to Dr. Jon Morris (my supervisory committee chair) for his invaluable guidance, mentorship, and the unfathomable emotional support he provided. For her untiring guidance on research design, I also wish to thank Dr. Lynda Kaid. In addition, this dissertation has benefited immensely from the constructive comments I received from Dr. Jorge Villegas and Dr. David Miller. Without their efforts this would not have been nearly as rewarding an accomplishment. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my friends and faculty at the University of Florida, especially Dr. John Sutherland and Dr. Debbie Treise for their mentorship. I also truly thank Dr. Michael Weigold, Dr. Justin Brown, Seth Oyer, Annie Sugar, Sunny Hughes, Kenneth Kim, Tom Mueller, and Michael Clayton for their sincere support. The love of my parents enabled me to start and complete the otherwise impossible dream of attaining this degree. Without the tireless encouragement of my father and mother, I could not have completed this study. I deeply admire them. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 LIST OF TABLES...........................................................................................................................8 LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................9 ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................10 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................12 Need for the Study..................................................................................................................12 Purpose and Importance of Study...........................................................................................13 Outline ....................................................................................................................................15 2 LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................................................................16 History of Modern Political Marketing ..................................................................................16 Verbal Content and Effects of Political Advertising ..............................................................20 Issue and Image in Political Advertising.........................................................................21 Positive and Negative Political Advertising....................................................................22 Effects of Political Advertising: Memory .......................................................................22 Effects of Political Advertising: Candidate Electability .................................................32 Summary of the Effects of Political Advertising ............................................................39 Informational and Transformational Advertising...................................................................40 Antecedent 1: Newness of the Product............................................................................40 Antecedent 2: Level of Risk............................................................................................41 Antecedent 3: Product Involvement ................................................................................41 Antecedent 4: Product Conspicuousness.........................................................................42 Antecedent 5: Product versus Service .............................................................................42 Typology of Informational/Transformational Strategies.................................................43 Summary..........................................................................................................................45 Survey Scale of Informational/Transformational Advertising ........................................46 Emotion in Advertising...........................................................................................................48 Rational and Emotional Responses .................................................................................48 Measuring Emotion .........................................................................................................52 Physiological measures ............................................................................................52 Self-report measures.................................................................................................54 Discrete approach to emotion...................................................................................54 Dimensional approach to emotion............................................................................55 Measuring emotion with AdSAM® ..........................................................................59 Summary of Literature Review ..............................................................................................60 Hypotheses and Research Questions ......................................................................................62 5 Perception of Advertising Content ..................................................................................62 Memory ...........................................................................................................................63 Candidate Electability .....................................................................................................64 3 MATERIALS AND METHODS ...........................................................................................67 Materials and Measures ..........................................................................................................67 Independent Variables.....................................................................................................67 Perception of ad content...........................................................................................67 Prior exposure to ad and familiarity with candidate ................................................68 Dependent Variables .......................................................................................................68 Message recall..........................................................................................................68 Emotional response ..................................................................................................68 Candidate electability...............................................................................................69 Graded Response Model (GRM) of Item Response Theory (IRT) ........................................69 4 RESULTS...............................................................................................................................76 Pretest .....................................................................................................................................76 Main Study: Model Estimation and Results ...........................................................................76 Descriptive Statistics of Independent Variables..............................................................77 Prior exposure to ad and familiarity with candidate ................................................77 Perception of ad content...........................................................................................77 Descriptive Statistics of Dependent Variables ................................................................79 Message recall..........................................................................................................79 Candidate electability...............................................................................................80 Pleasure-arousal-dominance.....................................................................................83 Model Estimation ............................................................................................................85 Positive image condition ..........................................................................................86 Positive issue condition............................................................................................86 Negative image condition for the Candidate............................................................86 Negative image condition for the Opponent ............................................................87 Negative issue condition for the Candidate..............................................................87 Negative issue condition for the Opponent ..............................................................87 5 DISCUSSION.......................................................................................................................100 Overview...............................................................................................................................100