The Effect of Campaign Advertising on Voter Turnout at the Media Market Level.

This paper addresses the relationship between campaign advertising and voter turnout, supporting the hypothesis that advertising, in general, has a positive effect on turnout. Using advertising data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project, integrated with turnout data we collected from the nation's top 75 media markets, we also show how campaign tone, advertisement source, and advertisement prevalence can influence macro-level voter turnout in media markets. Extant research is inconclusive about the role of advertising in turnout. Most scholars examine this relationship at either the level of the individual voter or at the state level. This paper contributes to the debate by turning its attention to a rarely used unit of analysis - the designated marketing area (DMA), or media market. A DMA is a compilation of counties which are reached by a television signal. When campaigns or interest groups advertise on television they do it on the DMA level, not at the level of the individual voter or at the state level. Examining data at this level allows us to obtain a more precise estimate of turnout effects since this is the macro context in which voters are exposed to campaign messages. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]