Political Broadcasting: An International Perspective

While television broadcasting and spot advertising began to dominate U.S. elections in the 1950s, "American-style" television advertising has also increasingly played an important role in the political processes of Western European democracies. In the last decade, political parties and candidates in evolving democracies of East and Central Europe, in Latin America, and in Asia also discovered the advantages of complete control over messages broadcast directly to voters via electronic media. This papers on this panel offer new data on the style and content of international political broadcasting from several different perspectives and explore the potential effects of such broadcasts on voter perceptions of candidates.

Many studies of the media's role in modern elections suggest that, while television remains a major source of public information about national elections, broadcast media outlets at the national network and local levels have decreased their coverage of elections in the past decade. Such reductions have made the dominance of television advertising even more important as a source of voter information. Despite predictions about its declining importance, the 2000 and 2002 elections in the United States saw record amounts of spending for political advertising.

The studies on this panel provide new information about the changing roles of political television messages in important European democracies and make comparisons with the U.S. system. In the 2002 German election, for instance, Holtz-Bacha found that the large political parties have tremendous potential for political advertising expenditures but invested less money in it during 2002 than in previous cycles. On the other hand, elections in evolving democracies in Poland and Bulgaria have seen an important role for the advertising in voter opinions, as the functions and systems of all types of media have evolved in several ways since the changes in the early 1990s. Elections in Spain have also been affected by political advertising, and the recent 2002 French elections were marked by television presentations that allowed extremist Le Pen to achieve the national visibility and support that catapulted him into a run-off for the French presidency against Jacques Chirac.

Each of these studies on political advertising offers unique insights into the evolution of this important form of voter information. Taken together they also provide the opportunity to discuss comparative approaches and to examine how similarities and differences in culture, media systems, and political situations may affect voter perceptions of political parties and candidates.

Participants:

Lynda Lee Kaid, University of Florida, USA (Chair and Presenter)
Christina Holtz-Bacha, University of Mainz, GERMANY (Presenter)
Lilia Raycheva, Sofia University, BULGARIA (Presenter)
Daniela V. Dimitrova, University of Florida, USA (Presenter)
Andrzei Piotr Falkowski, Warsaw Advanced School for Social Psychology, POLAND (Presenter)
Wojciech Cwalina, Warsaw Advanced School for Social Psychology, POLAND (Presenter)
Perez Julio Cesar Herrero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, SPAIN (Presenter)
Colleen Connelly-Ahern, University of Florida, USA (Presenter)
Nathalie Gagnere, Institute of Politics, Lyon, FRANCE (Presenter)
Andrew Paul Williams, University of Florida, USA (Presenter)

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