AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: Despite the rapid growth of online political advertising, the vast majority of scholarship on political advertising relies exclusively on evidence from candidates’ television advertisements. The relatively low cost of creating and deploying online advertisements and the ability to target online advertisements more precisely may broaden the set of candidates who advertise and allow candidates to craft messages to more narrow audiences than on television. Drawing on data from the newly-released Facebook Ad Library API and television data from the Wesleyan Media Project, we find that a much broader set of candidates advertise on Facebook than television, particularly in down-ballot races. We then examine within-candidate variation in the strategic use and content of advertising on television relative to Facebook for all federal, gubernatorial, and state legislative candidates in the 2018 election. Among candidates who use both advertising media, Facebook advertising occurs earlier in the campaign, is less negative, less issue focused, and more partisan than television advertising.
Zachary Peskowitz is an associate professor of political science at Emory University. He completed his PhD in political economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2012. Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2015, Peskowitz held a position as an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Peskowitz’s primary research focus is American politics, with a particular interest in how elections affect policy outcomes. His articles have been published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and other journals.