The Effects of Appeal Types and Candidates’ Poll Rankings in Negative Political Advertising

This paper combines the persuasion knowledge model (PKM) and priming theory to investigate the effects of different appeal types in negative political ads on voters’ cognitive responses and candidate responses, and explore the moderating effect of an important candidate-related variable: poll ranking. The results indicate that negative advertising based on rational appeals is more beneficial to candidates who lag in the polls. However, negative ads based on emotional appeals generate better responses from voters when used by poll leaders. These effects are observed regardless of whether the race is between an incumbent and a challenger or two challengers.