Polarization in Less than Thirty Seconds: Continuous Monitoring of Voter Response to Campaign Advertising

Abstract: American political campaigns activate and reinforce rather than alter voters' basic partisan predispositions. Both aggregate and individual-level studies demonstrate that exposure to campaign communication strengthens the correspondence between partisan predispositions and voting choice (for a review, see Iyengar and Simon, 2000). At the aggregate level of analysis, the reinforcement effect appears over time, as voters gradually align their voting intention with the so-called “fundamentals:” e.g., partisanship, retrospective ...