Quantifying the potential persuasive returns to political microtargeting.

ABSTRACT: Much concern has been raised about the power of political microtargeting to sway voters' opinions, influence elections, and undermine democracy. Yet little research has directly estimated the persuasive advantage of microtargeting over alternative campaign strategies. Here, we do so using two studies focused on U.S. policy issue advertising. To implement a microtargeting strategy, we combined machine learning with message pretesting to determine which advertisements to show to which individuals to maximize persuasive impact. Using survey experiments, we then compared the performance of this microtargeting strategy against two other messaging strategies. Overall, we estimate that our microtargeting strategy outperformed these strategies by an average of 70% or more in a context where all of

SUBMITTER: Tappin BM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10288628 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature