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2012 Campaign Advertising Volume Crushed Previous Records;

Interest Group and Dark Money Analyses in the Works

(MIDDLETOWN, CT) Feb. 14, 2013 – Two comprehensive studies of the campaign ad trends from the 2012 election have been published by the researchers from the Wesleyan Media Project.

Negative, Angry, and Ubiquitous: Political Advertising in 2012” by Erika Franklin Fowler of Wesleyan University and Travis N. Ridout of Washington State University, and “Interest Groups in Electoral Politics: 2012 in Context” by Michael Franz of Bowdoin College, appear in the most recent issue of The Forum, a Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics. Read a summary of these publications on the blog of the Knight Foundation, a major funder of the Wesleyan Media Project.

For more information on these publications, please contact Lauren Rubenstein at Wesleyan’s Department of Media Relations, (860) 685-3813 or lrubenstein@wesleyan.edu.

Upcoming Work

The presidential election may be over, but in many ways the Wesleyan Media Project analyses of 2012 are just getting started.  In the coming months, we will have updates examining interest group advertising, issue content relative to candidate ads, how disclosure of interest groups (and the method of disclosure) matters for citizen perceptions, and thanks to the Center for Responsive Politics, we will also have new figures on the role of dark money in the 2012 elections.  We are also very excited about new analyses we are conducting on ad persuasion using innovative new data from Ace Metrix.  Sign up here for email updates about our work, or follow us on Twitter here.