I need to partially withdraw what I said a month or so ago about negative political advertising and turnout: apparently it's not the case that negative campaign ads depress voter turnout. At least according to The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment by Richard R. Lau, Lee Sigelman, and Ivy Brown Rovner in The Journal of Politics, Vol. 69, No. 4, November 2007 (PDF at this address, via NPR).
What these authors did was to take the findings from 111 different studies completed between 1984 and 2006 and mash them up together into one big study (a "meta-analysis" because [jump]
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| The original Demon Sheep, Tony Blair, in a Tory ad from 1997. Guardian. He won his election. |
What these authors did was to take the findings from 111 different studies completed between 1984 and 2006 and mash them up together into one big study (a "meta-analysis" because [jump]
