“Political advertising and consumer sentiment: Evidence from U.S. presidential elections,” by Assistant Professor of Economics Cody Couture and Ann Owen, the Henry Platt Bristol Chair of Public Policy and Professor of Economics, was recently published in the European Journal of Political Economy.
The article focuses on a study that used panel survey data on consumer sentiment and data on U.S. political advertisements run from 2013 to 2020 to estimate dynamic panel data models predicting the effect of positive, negative, and contrasting ads on several measures of consumer sentiment. The results show that political ads during presidential election cycles have a significant impact.
Couture and Owen found that “in particular, a higher intensity of positive political ads with an economic theme makes consumers more optimistic about their own current and future financial positions and the future state of the economy.
“Our findings also suggest that political ads impact sentiment through an emotional appeal rather than by providing information to viewers about economic fundamentals,” they added.
