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Political (Election) Advertising

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Streamlining Political Communication Concepts

Abstract

Individual and collective political actors use advertising to strategically influence political attitudes, perceptions, behavior, and emotions mostly in the context of elections. Thus, the advertising primarily aims at affecting vote choice and turnout. Due to the long tradition and the importance of ads in election campaigns, research on political advertising is dominated by the USA and focuses on audiovisual advertising on television and, more recently, social media. However, since political advertising, just as any commercial advertising, is strongly linked to the (political) culture of a country, findings from US research are difficult to generalize and transfer to other political cultures. Until now, there is a lack of international comparative studies, which would be necessary to identify what are generic political advertising formats and strategies in contrast to national specifics that reflect the characteristics of a political culture.

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Holtz-Bacha, C. (2023). Political (Election) Advertising. In: Salgado, S., Papathanassopoulos, S. (eds) Streamlining Political Communication Concepts. Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_8

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