Travis N. Ridout |
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Research My broad areas of research interest include political communication, voting, elections and campaigns, political participation, presidential nominations and survey methodology. Current projects I'm working on include:
I am also involved in the department's Political Research and Methods Symposium
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Book Campaign Advertising and American Democracy. 2007. With Michael M. Franz, Paul Freedman and Kenneth M. Goldstein. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 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 the 2000 elections. What were the consequences of this barrage of advertising? Were viewers turned off by political advertising to the extent that it dissuaded them from voting, as some critics suggest? Did they feel more connected to political issues and the political system or were they alienated? These are the questions this book answers, based on a unique, robust, and extensive database dedicated to political advertising. Confronting prevailing opinion, the authors of this carefully researched work find that political ads may actually educate, engage, and mobilize American voters. Only in the rarest of circumstances do they have negative impacts. Journal Articles Free Advertising: How the Media Amplify Campaign Messages. Forthcoming. With Glen R. Smith. Political Research Quarterly. 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 10 U.S. Senate campaigns in 2004. We find that ad amplification is quite common and that negative and comparative ads are much more likely to receive media attention than positive ads. This has implications for how scholars measure ad exposure and for understanding why Americans dislike negative advertising. News Media Use and Americans’ Perceptions of Global Threat. Forthcoming. With Andrew M. Appleton and Ashley C. Grosse. British Journal of Political Science. This article explores the antecedents of Americans' perceptions of global threat, which may influence people's policy preferences and ultimately public policy. We focus on three predictors of global threat perceptions: news media use, global knowledge, and global experience. Using the 2004 Survey of Attitudes and Global Engagement, we discover that media use best explains global threat perceptions, but its impact is largely conditional on the characteristics of the individual and on the type of threat. Local Television and Newspaper Coverage of Political Advertising. With Erika Franklin Fowler. Forthcoming. Political Communication. 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 stations in five Midwestern states in 2006, we find that coverage of advertising is quite extensive, most of it is low quality, and its volume depends both on the size of the market and the tone of the spots aired. Surprisingly, however, television stations were not more likely than newspapers to cover advertising, though television does appear to be more sensitive to negative advertising, consistent with our theory. Understanding the Effect of Political Advertising on Voter Turnout: A Response to Krasno and Green. 2008. With Michael M. Franz, Paul Freedman and Kenneth M. Goldstein. Journal of Politics. 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 agree that political advertising does little to undermine voter participation. Evaluating Measures of Campaign Tone. 2008. With Michael M. Franz. Political Communication. 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 paper, we evaluate several methods of assessing tone, focusing specifically on several U.S. Senate races from 1998-2002. We find that several of the measures are closely related, and one's substantive findings are seldom altered by substituting one measure for another. Thus, theory, and matters of practicality, should guide one's choice of tone measures. Does Political Advertising Persuade? 2007. With Michael M. Franz. Political Behavior. Well over $1 billion was spent on televised political advertising in the United States 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 political ads in the nation's top media markets and a survey of presidential and U.S. Senate voters in 2004. We ask whether exposure to presidential and Senate advertising influences voters' evaluations of candidates and the choices that they make at the ballot box. In the end, we find considerable evidence that advertising persuades-and that its impact varies depending on the characteristics of the viewer. Does the Media Agenda Reflect the Candidates' Agenda? 2007. With Rob Mellen, Jr. Harvard International Journal/Press Politics. 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 advertising to track the candidate
agenda and using content analyses of both local newspapers and local television
news broadcasts, we find that the degree of candidate-media issue convergence
varies depending on both the state and on the medium examined (television
or newspapers). Dialogue in American Political Campaigns? An Examination of Issue Engagement in Candidate Television Advertising. 2006. With Noah Kaplan and David K. Park. American Journal of Political Science. 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 develop a new measure of “issue convergence” and test whether or not issue convergence increases as the competitiveness of the race increases. Using new data based upon television advertising aired in U.S. Senate campaigns from 1998 through 2002, we find that issue engagement or dialogue occurs more frequently than indicated by previous research. We also find that issue engagement increases with the competitiveness of the race but that issue engagement decreases as the gap in financial resources between candidates increases. Measuring
the Effects of Televised Political Advertising in the United States.
2004. With Ken Goldstein. Annual Review of Political Science.
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 its tone on voter turnout. This essay reviews what scholars know about how political advertising affects voter decisions, voter knowledge, and election outcomes. We argue that scholars still have a long road to travel before being able to speak definitively about whether and to what extent political advertisements are successful in achieving the goal of their sponsors: winning elections. This state of affairs may be due to the vast number of methods used to measure the key independent variable in these studies: advertising exposure. Accordingly, in the last section of the essay, we review and critique seven approaches to the study of political advertising. Evaluating Measures of Campaign Advertising Exposure on Political Learning. 2004. With Dhavan V. Shah, Kenneth M. Goldstein and Michael M. Franz. Political Behavior. 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 six different measurement approaches—from the simple to the complex—on learning about political candidates. Two datasets are used in this inquiry: (1) geo-coded political advertising time-buy data, and (2) a national panel study concerning patterns of media consumption and levels of political knowledge. We conclude that many traditional methods of assessing exposure are flawed. Fortunately, there is a relatively simple measure that predicts knowledge about information featured in ads. This measure involves combining a tally of the volume of advertisements aired in a market with a small number of survey questions about the television viewing habits of geo-coded respondents. The Politics of Participation: Mobilization and Turnout Over Time. 2002. With Ken Goldstein. Political Behavior. 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 rates of mobilization may have declined, (b) the effectiveness of mobilization contacts may have declined, and (c) the targeting of mobilization may have changed. The first two theories have been well articulated in the literature; the third has not. We find no evidence of a decline in mobilizing activity, nor do we find that mobilizing techniques have become less effective. Although we find that campaigns are more likely to target habitual voters in recent years, this pattern of behavior can only explain a small amount of the overall decline in turnout. Working Papers Measuring the Nature and Effects of Campaign Advertising. 2002. With Michael Franz, Kenneth Goldstein and Paul Freedman. One reason scholarly debates over the effects of campaign advertising still continue is that good measures of the frequency and content of the advertising environment and valid indicators of advertising exposure have been unavailable. In this paper, we review six approaches to the measurement of campaign advertising, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each in turn. We then highlight the use of advertising tracking data for measuring the campaign information environment, a technique that has many of the advantages of traditional approaches without many of the disadvantages. We offer assessments of the approach’s validity and reliability before showing how it can be used in combination with survey data to test hypotheses and make claims about advertising’s influence on political attitudes and voting behavior. |
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