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Spanish-Language Political Commercials: Does the Method of Persuasion Affect Overall Efficacy?
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by Silvia Fabela - Monmouth College
Category: Cross-Cultural
Political commercials are a major vehicle for disseminating information about candidates in modern campaigns. There are three main methods, including antithesis, explicit and implicit, used to foster common ground and persuade them to vote for the sponsor of the commercial. A mixed factorial design was used in which independent variables included fluency level and ad type. It was hypothesized that Spanish-language commercials that use the implicit method of identification are more persuasive in terms of likelihood to vote for the sponsoring candidate than those that use explicit or antithesis. Results showed a main effect of the types of ads, albeit a post hoc test revealed that the explicit and implicit methods of persuasion were more persuasive than the antithesis.