Second-level agenda-setting and political advertising: A content analysis of the framing dimensions used by the 2004 presidential candidates

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2005-05

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Abstract

Political advertising has been researched for decades with the respect to the effectiveness of negative advertisements versus positive or neutral advertisements. The research has also examined into the effectiveness of political advertising based on the gender of the political candidate. However, little research has analyzed political parties and their attempt to frame women in televised political advertisements. A gender gap has been present since 1980, but in the 2004 election George W. Bush increased his number of female voters by five percent. This factor reveals the need to discover if framing women in political advertising potentially played a role in this increase.

A content analysis of each advertisement was performed to analyze the attempt to frame through the advertisements. Many significant findings resulted from the data collected including George W. Bush was marginally more likely to feature women in his advertisements and more likely to feature women in major roles in his advertisements. It was also suggested that advertisements that featured women were far more likely to have a positive tone and were more likely to be abstract.

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Keywords

Political advertising, Second-level agenda setting

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