Collaborative Research: Understanding the Evolution of Political Campaign Advertisements over the Last Century

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Television advertising, a primary way voters hear about candidates absent a media filter, is ubiquitous with political campaigns in the United States. Drawing on an existing but underutilized data set of over 100,000 political ads, this project examines the evolution of political advertising, especially as it pertains to issue advocacy and consonance. The project makes significant methodological and substantive contributions to several fields including political, information, and library sciences, and enhances our understanding of the way ads shape and inform political behavior. It also promotes interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate education at research and teaching institutions in the emerging sub-field of automated audiovisual analysis, including students and scholars from traditionally underrepresented groups.The project uses a collection of over 100,000 political ads from 1912-2018, the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Collection archived at the University of Oklahoma, to develop (1) an automated system to identify issue (and other politically relevant) content from ad image, audio, and text and (2) a state-of-the-art user interface that gives researchers the ability to query, interact with and view videos, and also output data for analysis. The project uses the data to examine the evolution of political advertising, testing models of horizontal and vertical diffusion of issues. The project’s tools and data, introduced at an interdisciplinary workshop, are widely available to scholars across a number of disciplines who study American politics, campaigns, political communication and public opinion.This collaborative project is jointly funded by the Accountable Institutions and Behavior (AIB) program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.