CHAPTER TWO+LITERATURE REVIEW2.1CONCEPT OF POLITICAL ADVERTISINGEFFFECT OF POLITICAL ADVERTISINGThe harsh tone of political advertising, the often controversial techniques employed by politicaladvertisers, and the fact that the competing claims made in campaign ads are beyond review, have raised questions about the goals of political advertisers. Many critics have suggested that political advertisers seek votes at any cost, even including a degraded sense of public regard for the candidates and the electoral process. Perhaps the amount of negativity featured in political campaigns is designed to shrink the "market" rather than increase the sponsors relative share. Discouraging people from voting is much more feasible than persuading supporters of one candidate to vote for the opponent. It is well known that most Nigerians hold fast to their partisan attachments and that the act of voting generally serves expressive (as opposed to instrumental) needs. Since people acquire their affiliation with the Democratic or Republican parties early in life, the probability that they will cross party lines in response to an advertising campaign is slight. And since the motivation to vote is typically symbolic or psychological (in the sense that ones vote is unlikely to be pivotal in determining the outcome of the election), increasing the level of controversy and conflict in ad campaigns is bound to discourage voters from making a choice and casting a vote. In effect, negative campaigns create an "avoidance" set within the electorate (Houston et al., 1998, 1999).Although the scholarly evidence is mixed, experimental studies substantiate these claims. Carefully controlled manipulations of advertising tone demonstrate that exposure to negative (rather than positive) campaign advertising heightens political cynicism and diminishes voter turnout (Ansolabehere et al., 1999). It is hardly coincidental that the publics views of elections and the importance of voting have soured as political advertising campaigns have become increasingly reliant on negative appeals. In 1960, for example, only one in four Americansendorsed the statement that "public officials dont care much about what people like me think." By 1990,the cynical response was given by six of ten Americans (see Rosenstone and Hansen, 1992).Exposure to political campaigns has extracted a similar toll on the publics views of political advertising.There is ample survey data showing that the public dislikes mediabasedpolitical campaigns. Accordingto the most recent surveys by the Pew Center, a majority of the electorate (some 60 percent) felt thatcampaign commercials were not useful in helping them choose a candidate during the 1998 elections andmore than twothirds(68%) judged the campaign as "nasty" (Pew Center, 1998). And in a recent surveyof voters in Virginia, some threefourthsof the sample indicated that negative campaigns were likely todiscourage people from voting (Freedman, 1999).Does the fallout from exposure to political advertising spread to commercial advertising in general? Weattempt to answer this question experimentally, by manipulating exposure to political advertising andthen measuring participants attitudes towards political and commercial ad campaigns. We alsomanipulate the tone of political advertising in order to assess the impact of negative political campaignson the audiences confidence in political and product advertisers. Our results indicate that exposure topolitical advertising in general andnegative political advertising in particular strengthensviewersrelative confidence in commercial advertising. People do not assimilate their generally unfavorableratings of political ads to the commercial advertising arena. Nor do they express more favorable attitudestoward commercial advertising in the aftermath of exposure to political advertising. However, becausecampaigns heighten distaste for political advertising, the net effect is to boost the relative appeal ofcommercial advertising. Thus, exposure to political campaigns enlarges the contrast between commercialand political advertising.

REVIEW OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND ELECTION CAMPAIGN IN NIGERIAAccording to Opeibi (2005): Election periods in any nation generate a lot of interest among the political candidates in particular, and the civil society, in general. This is because the destiny of the people and the nation rests squarely on the shoulders of the successful candidates at the polls. It is no wonder, then that both political actors and their supporters deploy different persuasive strategies to elicit support and woo voters in order to gain and control power.Concerning the candidates, Olukotun (2002) assert that it is important for voters to know their qualifications, opinions, voting records, where they exist, and personality traits. Of equal importance is the need for voters to have information about the policies and manifestoes of the respective parties in order to make a clear choice, One sure means of achieving this aim is through the mass media. Through coverage and presentation of news, information, facts, figures, editorials, and other analytical pieces about an issue, the mass media exert considerable influence on the creation of awareness on that issue (Enahoro, 2010:300). There is also little doubt that political advertising as a means of raising political consciousness has gained ground in Nigeria. This view appears not inconsistent with the one held by Tejumaiye (2008:85) who reiterates that even the regulatory bodies, that is, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) uses political advertising messages to persuade the electorate on how to vote, though not on whom to vote. On account that politicians effectively use the media as a mobilising tool, Onovbaire (1992: iii) remarks that the Nigerian electorate is getting more politically enlightened Voters, therefore, become knowledgeable about the voting process. They are also less inclined to vote on religious or ethnic affiliations. This position is corroborated by IIDEA (2000:130) in some interviews conducted thus: The interviews suggest that ethnicity is becoming a less salient feature in electoral politics, and that the dysfunctional role of ethnicity in undermining democratic governance and competitive electoral policies appears to be waning. Respondents mentioned the results of the 1993 annulled presidential elections and those of the 1999 presidential elections, in support of this observation as one of the respondents put it: We seem to have built a bridge of understanding over and above the role of ethnicity in elections.But elections in Nigeria have not convinced us that the electorate are completely informed. Apart from the 1993 June 12 presidential election which MKO Abiola was alleged to have won, all other elections, before and after, are not adjudged to be free and fair. While incumbency takes its toll on politics on one hand, the electorate mortgage their franchise on the other. Of greatest concern is election rigging in all ramifications. While writing on political violence, Doghudje (1992:91) avers that the 1991 primaries was violent-prone. He supports this claim with the TSM magazines report of November 3, 1991 which had the following highlights: Acid bath at NRC Headquarters, shoot-out at SDP Headquarters Doghudje (1992) further quotes what Chief Falae, a leading presidential aspirant for the SDP said as reported in the Guardian of Thursday, October 31, 1991 that since the October 19, 1991 primaries, Nigerians have been subjected to an incredible replay of election rigging in certain states, on a scale and in a form most people had thought impossible in our national politics. Disturbed by this scenario, Late President Umaru Yar Adua, in his May 29, 2007 speech is cited in Onah (2007:174) to have promised Nigerians that we have a lot of work to re-examine the electoral process so as to make future elections peaceful, credible and acceptable to the vast majority of our people. I consider this as a major legacy I want to leave Nigeria at the end of my Presidency: That we conduct credible and transparent election. The bed rock to which such expectation becomes tenable is by empowering people. Nigeria is a vast nation comprising multiple cultures. But human development, according to Tejumaiye (2008:70), scores low as the country is rated 158 out of 177 countries surveyed. According to him, the Human Development Index report (2005) of the UNDP states that 54.4% of Nigerians live below the poverty level and this deprives them of access to the mass media. In the case of media men and women they sometimes have the tendency of tilting messages in favour of given candidates. In the rural setting particularly, where there is disconnect of people from the mass media, interpersonal communication they rely on may be distorted if not misleading. Faced with this dilemma, it becomes a political disaster once the mass media fail to educate citizens about the political process. It is in view of this that we can conveniently align with Schechters (2004) position, when he captures his American experience as cited in Baran and Davis (2009:294) that the failure of mass media to inform the public about the proposals of this years presidential candidates, is, in its own way, as serious a journalistic betrayal as the failure to raise questions about the rush to invade Iraq. POLITICAL ADVERTISING AND VOTING INTENTIONSUnderstanding the effect of ads on voting intentions, and the channels through which this may operate, is a challenging task from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. From the theoretical perspective, scholars have developed models and theories that can be grouped into two broad categories (Della Vigna and Gentzkow, 2010). On one hand, some papers show that advertising can have an effect on behavior by providing information to voters about candidates characteristics. On the other, some studies suggest that advertising has a persuasive effect, making individuals more likely to cast their vote for a specific candidate when exposed to her ads, even in contexts in which the ads have no informational content.Identifying which of the two channels prevails has important policy implications for campaign regulation. Empirical studies then, not only face the challenge of estimating the reduced-form effect of political advertising on voting outcomes, but also if such results are supportive of the informative or persuasive view. These two sets of models deliver rather different predictions which, however, are hard to test empirically. For example, the informative view suggests that advertising should have a larger effects on voters with less precise prior beliefs about candidate quality. The persuasive view predicts that ads may have an impact on voters behavior even in contexts in which ads contain no information about the candidates quality. Identifying voters prior beliefs, or defining if the content of advertising is informative is a challenging task, and generally requires strong structural assumptions (when trying to estimate voters priors) or subjective judgements (when evaluating if the ads have informational content). Nonetheless, indirect evidence may contribute to shed light on which of these models best fits the data.A large stream of literature has investigated the effect of political advertisement on voting using different empirical approaches. Some studies, such as Valentino et al. (2004) and Brader (2005), are based on evidence from laboratory experiments and document large and significant effects of TV ads have effect on voters choices. Brader (2005) finds support for the persuasive view, by experimentally showing that, by appealing different emotions, advertising can have differing effects on voters behavior. On the contrary, Valentino et al. (2004) presents evidence in support of the informational channel, as advertising seems to have larger effects on less informed individuals. Given the superior control that well-designed lab experiments can provide, these studies have strong internal validity; however, apart from the conflicting results, since they do not involve real-world electoral competitions, their external validity is rather limited.A range of non-experimental studies have also looked at the impact of ads on voters attitudes and electoral behavior, generally finding evidence of small effects, and little evidence disentangling the channels through which advertising is affecting voters behavior. It is unclear to what extent these results might be driven by limitations of the research design related to the choice of the elections examined or to the nature of the instrumental variables used. For example, Gerber (1998) uses candidate wealth as an instrument in order to estimate the reduced for effect of campaign spending on voting outcomes. However, to the extent that a candidates fortune is correlated with her vote getting ability through channels other than campaign spending, these estimates may be biased. Huber and Arceneaux (2007) estimate the effect of political ads in the context of the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign by exploiting differences in exposure to ads between media markets (in nonswing states) that are respectively adjacent to and isolated from swing states. The authors find that, although ads do not appear to make viewers more informed about key campaign issues, they can alter their assessments of candidates personal characteristics and, ultimately, their voting decisions. They interpret these findings as supportive of the persuasive view. A potential limitation of their empirical approach is that proximity to battleground states may be related to political preferences in ways other than through exposure to ads during the campaign, and that, hence, treatment and control groups may not be fully comparable. Larreguy et al. (2014) estimate the reduced form effects of advertising on voting outcomes in the same context as the one studied in this paper, comparing neighboring polling stations with varying TV and radio stations reception, finding relatively large effects. As in Huber and Arceneaux (2007), the extent to which political preferences may differ across polling stations with different radio and TV reception may question the validity of their findings. Da Silveira and De Mello (2011) examines the impact of political ads on voting in the context of Brazilian run-off gubernatorial elections between 1998 and 2006. Apart from not attempting to identify the specific channels through which ads may impact vote intentions, their empirical strategy is threatened by the fact that other electoral dynamics occurring between first and second round may interfere with the identification of the effect of ads.6 Martin (2012) investigates the relative importance of the informational and the persuasive channels. However, the study uses the price of advertising in different media markets as an instrument for advertising. The extent to which the price of advertising is correlated with their potential impact threatens the consistency of his estimates. Other studies have used randomized field experiments to examine the relation between ads and voting. In the largest of these experiments, and possibly the closest study to ours, Gerber et al. (2007) randomize the assignment across media markets of $2 million dollar worth of TV and radio ads for the incumbent candidate in the 2006 Texas gubernatorial campaign. Combining the information on the distribution of ads with data from daily electoral surveys, the authors find that ads have a positive but short-lived impact on candidate evaluations. The short-liveness of the impact of the ads is interpreted by the authors as evidence supporting the persuasive view.Our analysis employ similar approaches to those in the existing literature, trying to test both if advertising has an impact on both intentions, and providing evidence that may contribute to identify if this effect is better explained by the informational or persuasive views. As explained later, we will not only be able to test for the impact of ads on vote intentions, but also if such effect is shortlived, if ads have an impact on the voters knowledge of the candidates positions, and if the effect is larger on individuals with more prior information about candidates qualities.