Travis N. Ridout

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Washington State University

p>Although modern data-driven campaigning (DDC) is not entirely new, scholars have typically relied on reports and interviewers of practitioners to understand its use. However, the advent of public ad libraries from Meta and Google provides an opportunity to measure the scope and variation in DDC practice in advertising across different types of sp...

When it comes to the study of the messaging of online political campaigns, theory suggests that platform divergence should be common, but much research finds considerable convergence across platforms. In this research, we examine variation across digital and social media platforms in the types of paid campaign messages that are distributed, focusin...

For decades, television has dominated political advertising, but that is changing due to the rise of advertising online and on social and digital media. How do people view online political advertising and how does this compare to their views of television advertising? To address these questions, we examine a nationally representative survey of 1200...

This analysis focuses on candidate-sponsored digital advertising spending in federal races in the 2022 midterm elections. We focus the analysis on spending on Meta (which includes Facebook and Instagram) and Google (which includes YouTube and search-related ads). We identify just under $150 million in candidate spending in federal races on these tw...

This analysis focuses on broadcast advertising spending in congressional races in 2022. We discuss four patterns that characterized ads in these races. First, there was a record volume of television advertising for a midterm election. Despite frequent claims that traditional ads would begin to decline, the air war featured more spots than in 2014 a...

This article is a “first look” at political advertising in 2020. Spending on political advertising in the United States in 2020 obliterated records, and Democrats held huge advantages in the presidential race and in most congressional and senatorial races. In addition, all indicators suggest that spending on digital advertising continued to rise. P...

We examine how campaigns use advertising in the current digital era – and how spending decisions depend on the stage of the campaign and the particular goal being pursued. Our investigation relies on a database consisting of thousands of ads placed on Facebook by 24 different U.S. Senate campaigns in 2018. In the end, we find that campaigns pursue...

Les campagnes politiques aux États-Unis sont considérées comme particulièrement négatives, surtout au niveau présidentiel. Cette recherche analyse la négativité de la campagne présidentielle de 2016 dans ce pays en se concentrant sur les publicités payantes, à la fois à la télévision et en ligne. Les résultats pointent globalement des niveaux de né...

Interest groups scholars often want to track the political involvement of groups through their advertising, but there is no one source that covers the universe of advertising. We report here on three of the most commonly used and comprehensive data sources on group-sponsored advertising in the USA, noting the strengths and weaknesses of each. These...

Social Media and Democracy - edited by Nathaniel Persily September 2020

Despite the rapid growth of online political advertising, the vast majority of scholarship on political advertising relies exclusively on evidence from candidates’ television advertisements. The relatively low cost of creating and deploying online advertisements and the ability to target online advertisements more precisely may broaden the set of c...

The state of Washington saw a “blue wave” in the November 2018 midterm elections. Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell was reelected with 58.4% of the vote. In the House of Representative elections, Democrats snatched the 8th Congressional district from Republicans. And yet, the carbon tax initiative (I-1631) lost, securing only 43.5% of the vote. A n...

This research offers a post-mortem on political advertising in 2018, providing important context for 2018’s “blue wave.” In a majority of US House of Representatives races, there were more pro-Democratic than pro-Republican ads, including in the most competitive contests. The one theme that united pro-Democratic advertising was health care, which w...

This research explores the extent to which campaigns are consistent across communications channels in the issues that they emphasize. We compare the issue agendas in candidates’ television advertising, tweets and emails from dozens of U.S. Senate races in 2014, creating a measure of issue convergence for each candidate. We find moderate levels of i...

Scholars agree that there has been an increase in polarization among political elites, though there continues to be debate on the extent to which polarization exists among the mass public. Still, there is general agreement that the American public has become more sorted over the past two decades, a time during which political ad volumes have increa...

Ads aired in judicial campaigns have traditionally been quite tame—largely positive and focused on candidate traits such as experience. Judicial norms against attacking opponents and against position taking help to explain this fact, but sometimes these norms are violated. In this research, we ask whether the factors that drive negativity and polic...

Campaigns disproportionately choose men to voice their political ads, but it is not clear that men's voices are more credible or better able to persuade an audience. We employ experimental data and novel survey data to test theoretical expectations about the circumstances under which men's and women's voices might be more or less effective, specifi...

Purpose Despite the growing use of social media by politicians, especially during election campaigns, research on the integration of these media into broader campaign communication strategies remains rare. The purpose of this paper is to ask what the consequences of the transition to social media may be, specifically considering how Senate candidat...

The 2016 presidential campaign broke the mold when it comes to patterns of political advertising. Using data from the Wesleyan Media Project, we show the race featured far less advertising than the previous cycle, a huge imbalance in the number of ads across candidates and one candidate who almost ignored discussions of policy. This departure from...

Most studies of political advertising have failed to consider that advertising effects may build up across multiple election seasons or extend past Election Day. This study investigates the short-term and long-term effects of both same-cycle and multi-cycle exposure to campaign advertising on political and social trust and modes of political talk....

Recent court decisions have encouraged new types of interest groups to become involved in election campaigns. Yet questions remain about whether interest group sponsorship of advertising affects the content of the issues being discussed. The ability of interest groups to influence the campaign agenda has implications for the extent to which politic...

Political campaigns are much more attack-filled in some countries than in others. What accounts for it? One answer hinges on the country’s party system. We propose that two-party systems encourage more negativity than multiparty systems because parties in a multiparty system (1) must maintain good relationships with parties with which they may want...

This research explores the extent to which YouTube helps democratize campaigns by allowing non-traditional political actors to be heard. We examine political advertisements posted on YouTube in races for U.S. Senate in 2010. We find that ads posted by citizens and quasi-political organizations are viewed just as often as ads sponsored by some tradi...

We draw on a comprehensive database of American political advertising and television audience profile data to investigate the ways in which gender influences choices about the use of voice-overs in political advertising. Our findings suggest that although men voice the vast majority of political ads, campaigns do strategically choose the sex of the...

The volume of televised political advertising plateaued in 2014, as did levels of negativity. Yet the most interesting story about this advertising was the extensive involvement of outside groups, many of which did not disclose their donors. In many of the most competitive Senate races, groups surpassed the parties – and sometimes even the candidat...

One of the biggest recent advances in the study of political advertising has been the availability of systematic sources of data on when and where ads air—and their content. In this piece, we review the various data sources that scholars have used to study political advertising, focusing on their strengths and weaknesses. We then discuss recent stu...

This research examines how an attack ad’s sponsorship conditions its effectiveness. We use data from a survey experiment that exposed participants to a fictional campaign ad. Treatments varied the ad’s sponsor (candidate vs. group), the group’s donor base (small donor vs. large donors), and the format of the donor disclosure (news reports vs. discl...

Political advertising offers carefully crafted messages, not only in what the ad states explicitly in words but in the subtle messages conveyed in the background through tone, setting, and symbols. Scholars have studied different facets of campaign advertising to make generalizations about the messages candidates send, Americans receive, and the ef...

Record amounts of money went to purchase television advertising during the 2012 election cycle, resulting in unprecedented volumes of advertising. This increase was due in part to the ease with which outside groups, such as super PACs, were able to raise and spend advertising dollars in the current, post-Citizens United, regulatory regime. Advertis...

The authors investigate whether the news media and the tone of actual ads aired during a political campaign influence people’s perceptions of campaign ad tone. Using data on the content of political advertising, local television news coverage, and local newspaper coverage in nine races in five midwestern states in 2006, the authors discover that pe...

Although conventional wisdom suggests that imbalanced message flows are relatively rare in presidential campaigns, this view relies on the assumption that competing campaigns allocate their advertising similarly. In this research, we show that this assumption is false. We combine ad tracking data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project with a unique...

Recent research in the area of campaign advertising suggests that emotional appeals can influence political attitudes, electoral choices and decision-making processes. Yet is there any evidence that candidates use emotional appeals strategically during campaigns? Is there a pattern to their use? For instance, are fear appeals used primarily late in...

Political advertising offers an important window on American campaigns and elections. We analyze a comprehensive database of political ads aired during the 2010 midterms to shed light on campaign strategies in this history-making election. We find that with the increase in competitive races in 2010, the volume of advertising rose too, as did its ne...

Do electronic newspaper databases contain all of the stories that appear in the print edition? And does this depend on the database used? To explore these questions, we collected print copies of newspapers from cities across the USA and Canada. We compared coverage of two topics in these newspapers with the coverage obtained from keyword searches i...

The Persuasive Power of Campaign Advertising offers a comprehensive overview of political advertisements and their changing role in the Internet age. Travis Ridout and Michael Franz examine how these ads function in various kinds of campaigns and how voters are influenced by them. The authors particularly study where ads are placed, asserting that...

This article examines the situations under which candidates in multicandidate races go on the attack (both intraparty and interparty), paying special attention to the timing of the attacks, whether the attacker or the attacked is a front-runner or trailing, and candidate ideology. Using ad tracking data from the 2004 and 2008 U.S. presidential nomi...

This paper explores online political advertising in the form of digital videos posted on YouTube. Using a unique database of over 3,500 political ads posted on YouTube during the 2008 presidential campaign, it examines whether YouTube has allowed new actors to have an influence in electoral politics and whether ad creators are embracing new formats...

Scholars know too little about the message targeting strategies of political campaigns. There just is not much data on which messages are being targeted to which voters. Although recent efforts have attempted to study this by asking people to save the political mailings they receive, there remains much to learn about candidate message targeting str...

The 2008 presidential election was historic in many respects. The campaign included the first African American major-party candidate, and neither candidate was an incumbent president or vice president. In addition, one candidate took public funding and the other candidate did not. This latter disparity resulted in an imbalance of resources across t...

Objectives. The competitiveness of the 2008 presidential primaries in both the Republican and Democratic parties has prompted a reconsideration of the role of delegate‐selection rules in influencing the strategic behavior of presidential candidates. Using advertising and candidate state‐visit data from the 2004 and 2008 presidential nominating camp...

How often do the news media cover the advertising of political candidates? And how do the characteristics of the news outlet, the media market, the race, and the advertisements themselves influence the extent to which this ad amplification takes place? Examining Senate and gubernatorial campaign coverage by several newspapers and local television s...

Several trends, both societal and technological, suggest that televised political advertising should be losing its position at the center of today's political campaign, but is this the case? Analyzing ad-tracking data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential nominating campaigns, I show that the use of televised political advertising has, if anyt...

This article explores the antecedents of Americans' perceptions of global threat, which may influence people's policy preferences and ultimately public policy. Three predictors of global threat perceptions are in focus: news media use, global knowledge and global experience. Using the 2004 Survey of Attitudes and Global Engagement, it is discovered...

Much recent research has examined campaign tone—how positive or negative a campaign is—and its influence on a variety of political behaviors, including voter turnout. Yet there is little research testing the validity of these measures. Does the tone of candidate advertising, for example, reflect the tone of media coverage of a campaign? In this art...

The impact of political ads paid for by candidates is amplified because of the free media coverage they receive. Yet how frequently does that occur? And are certain types of ads more likely to be covered? To answer these questions, we performed a content analysis of news coverage in ten U.S. Senate campaigns in 2004. We find that ad amplification i...

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Krasno and Green have argued that political advertising has no impact on voter turnout. We remain unconvinced by their evidence, given concerns about how they measure the advertising environment, how they measure advertising tone, their choice of modeling techniques and the generalizability of their findings. These differences aside, we strongly ag...

Well over $1billion was spent on televised political advertising in the U.S. in 2004. Given the ubiquity of the 30 second spot, one might presume that ads must affect viewers’ vote choices. Somewhat surprisingly, though, scholars have yet to make much progress in confirming this claim. In this paper, we leverage a comprehensive dataset that tracks...

This article examines whether the issue agendas of political candidates are reflected in the coverage of the news media. In their coverage of political issues during a campaign, do the media follow the lead of the candidates, or do they chart their own course? The context for our investigation is five U.S. Senate races in 2002. Using television adv...

It has been estimated that more than three million political ads were televised leading up to the elections of 2004. More than $800,000,000 was spent on TV ads in the race for the White House alone and presidential candidates, along with their party and interest group allies, broadcast over a million ads -- more than twice the number aired before t...

The theory of issue ownership holds that competing candidates should avoid discussing many of the same issues during a campaign. In contrast, theories of democracy suggest that competitive elections are the mechanism by which the public can hold politicians accountable. To determine the extent to which each theory depicts current campaigns, we deve...

This article explores the antecedents of individuals' perceptions of global threat, which previous research has shown have an impact on people's policy preferences. We focus on three predictors of global threat perceptions: media exposure, global knowledge, and global experience. Using the 2004 Survey of Attitudes and Global Engagement, we discover...

Scholars employ various methods to measure exposure to televised political advertising but often arrive at conflicting conclusions about its impact on the thoughts and actions of citizens. We attempt to clarify one of these debates while validating a parsimonious measure of political advertising exposure. To do so, we assess the predictive power of...

I Abstract In the United States, televised political advertising is the main way that modern campaigns communicate with voters. Although political scientists have made great progress in the study of its effects in recent decades, much of that progress has come in the area of advertising's indirect effects: its impact on learning and the effect of i...

Please address all correspondence to the third author. Studies have found that electoral campaigns in the U.S. do not facilitate dialogue. That is, competing candidates rarely discuss the same issues. Indeed, Simon's (2002) formal model predicts that dialogue should not occur at all under normal circumstances. We extend Simon's model by incorporati...

Recent studies have argued that mobilization is not only an important determinant of individual participation, but that it can explain the mystery of declining voter turnout in the United States over the past 40 years. We identify and evaluate three possible ways in which mobilization might have affected levels of turnout over time: (a) aggregate r...

This research explores the extent to which the news media are able to shape people’s views of political campaigns, focusing specifically on their assessments of campaign tone. Does the news media’s portrayal of campaign tone - typically quite negative - do more to shape evaluations of campaign tone, or are people turning to more personal experience...

Agenda control matters in politics; yet scholars are only beginning to understand how campaigns and news media interact in shaping the agenda during campaigns. Drawing on extensive content data on candidate advertising, local television news, and local newspaper data from several gubernatorial and U.S. Senate campaigns in 2006, we first describe th...