L. Rice 4
example, in studies of limited locales, Patterson and McClure (1976) and Atkin and Heald (1976)
both link political advertising to issue awareness. More recently, Brians and Wattenberg (1996)
connect campaign advertisements to learning about issues across a broader sample of people,
Franklin (1991) finds that the information candidates running for Senate provide to voters
influences their perceptions of the candidates, West (1994) shows that advertisements have a
positive effect on learning, candidate image, favorability and electability, and Alvarez (1997)
demonstrates for several presidential elections and candidates that being able to recall a
candidate’s campaign advertisements reduces uncertainty about his policy positions.
1
Candidate advertising indeed appears to offer voters a low cost way to inform their
candidate choices. But just because information about candidates appears on the television
screen does not mean viewers will choose to devote enough attention to the advertisement to
learn something from it. In this paper I investigate the role of motivation on learning from
advertising. I argue that because attention and cognitive capacity are scarce resources, people
will be more likely to learn from campaign advertising when two conditions are satisfied: they
experience high levels of exposure to the advertisements and the information provided within
them proves relevant and potentially useful for casting a vote. This advances conventional
wisdom on the role of campaigns by more precisely identifying both the potential and the limits
of the role of campaign advertising on voter learning and suggests that candidate advertising may
improve the functioning of democracy through the information it provides.
I address these questions in a setting that requires more information than party
identification to cast a vote: presidential nominating primaries and caucuses. The system of state
1
Experimental results (e.g., Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1994; 1995) also suggest that learning from
advertising occurs through their findings that advertisements may influence perceptions of candidates and
the desire to vote.
Convention