Erika Franklin Fowler, Ph.D., is a Professor of Government and Director of the Wesleyan Media Project. Professor Fowler's research focusses on political advertising in the United States. The Wesleyan Media Project provides nonpartisan, publicly-available, real-time tracking and analysis of all political ads aired on television across the U.S. Please enjoy this interview to learn more about Dr. Fowler research, the Wesleyan Media Project, and the unanswered questions awaiting future scholars.

What question are you trying to answer with your research? 

The Wesleyan Media Project, which was founded in 2010, aims to track all election-related advertising on television and across online platforms to provide comparative analyses that enhance the ability of journalists, citizens, and scholars to hold governments and special interests accountable. During the heat of election season, we provide data on trends in spending and content and how activities by different advertising sponsors compare to prior cycles. The data that we collect are also essential to answering a host of important questions about campaign strategy, polarization in democracy, and whether and how the electorate understands the policy priorities of politicians for office.

One of the most pressing questions when we first began tracking shortly after the Citizens United decision was how growth in outside group activity would affect the content and quality of campaign discussions and citizen perceptions. Our research has helped to show both that outside group activity has been increasing over the past few decades and that ads sponsored by group are more negative than ads sponsored by candidates. Through experiments, we have also shown that group ads – especially ads from groups who are unknown – are more effective in moving opinions than identical content sponsored by candidates.

What was your first research experience?

My first research experience was at my undergraduate institution, in the context of a math practicum course. We were given a problem from an external organization, and we spent the semester working on potential solutions and presented our results back to them at the end. It was really exciting to work on applying my quantitative skills to a real-world problem, and definitely helped shape my interest in doing so in other contexts.

Tell us about the research that laid the foundation for your work; whose work are you building upon? 

Work on television advertising in particular grew out of concerns about the role of negativity in elections and its potential effect on turnout at the polls. Early experimental work suggested that negative advertising might depress voter turnout, and some of my advisor’s work with election tracking data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project (the predecessor to the Wesleyan Media Project) was among the first to challenge the conventional wisdom that negativity caused citizens to stay home, finding instead that negativity might stimulate interest and increase turnout. This challenge ignited an intense debate in the literature.

What questions will remain for the next generation of researchers?

There are so many questions to answer, especially regarding social and personalized media and the effects that it may have on society and on polarization and democratic and societal health. To the surprise of many, our first systematic look at television advertising as compared to Facebook and Instagram advertising revealed that television advertising was much more likely to contain attacks on opponent partisans (the traditional measure of negativity) and much more likely to talk about substantive policy issues. However, television advertising was also less partisan. We still do not know enough about how outside group and party advertising looks online and across social media platforms, and we need to better understand the scope, scale and effect of the large amounts of advertising that are targeting and tailored to specific audiences.

What is your favorite library database or book?

As a scholar of media and politics, I’m especially appreciative of all of the databases for local news – the two I use most frequently are LexisNexis and NewsBank Access World News.

How can someone learn more about your work?

Visit our website: mediaproject.wesleyan.edu! You can also check out our Delta Lab.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

I’ve described primarily the election work that I do, but I also do a lot of research at the intersection of health policy and politics with a focus on equity, and you can read about our cross-institutional team called the Collaborative on Media and Messaging (COMM) for Health and Social Policy at commhsp.org.