Cameron A. Shelton

Effect of Political Ads on TV

In a recently completed working paper titled “The Call to Political Prayer: Campaign Ads, Backlash, and the Importance of Targeting,” Cameron A. Shelton analyzed both post-election reports of vote choice and pre-election reports of candidate preferences and policy positions from the US presidential and congressional elections of 2012 and 2016. Using econometric techniques that enable causal inference (analyzing media market boundary discontinuities), he shows that political advertising on television does not convert anyone, but serves mainly to consolidate viewers’ prior ideological leanings. Ads consolidate and motivate the sponsor’s partisans while simultaneously engendering a countervailing consolidation and mobilization among supporters of the other party. They polarize. The existence of this backlash makes clear that parties will want to target ads to their own supporters to benefit from mobilization while avoiding mobilizing the other side. Hence the movement to political ads in social media, which can be targeted by age, gender, race, education, geography, job, interests, even likely political affiliation.

While at CESifo, Mr. Shelton will work on a follow-up to this paper, which is an analysis of political ads shown through Facebook and Google during the 2018 and 2020 campaigns. He will seek to determine whether these ads are better targeted, and whether they are similarly effective.

Beyond the implications for social choice that are of interest to political economists, Mr. Shelton’s results relate to issues of broader interest to economists in general. Namely, how do people process information to update their preferences? The existence of backlash – where an ad attempting to convince in one direction has opposite effects on sub-audiences – is difficult to reconcile with the Bayesian information processing model that forms the basis of neo-classical economics. During his visit to CESifo, he hopes to have conversations about how these results might be reconciled with canonical rationality.

Cameron A. Shelton is McMahon Family Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance of Claremont McKenna College, east of LA. He is currently Visiting Scholar at the Toulouse School of Economics. Mr. Shelton is the co-founder of “Suited”, a firm that uses AI and bespoke aptitude tests to equitably source diverse candidates for investment banking and law. He earned his PhD at the Stanford Graduate School of Business; his BS and AB are also from Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network.