Ask and You Shall Receive: The Effects of Negativity and Fundraising Appeals on Facebook

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129231186414
• Author: Amanda Wintersieck,Alex Keena
• Date: 01 December 2023

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(4) 1973–1986

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129231186414

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Ask and You Shall Receive: The Effects of

Negativity and Fundraising Appeals on

Facebook

Amanda Wintersieck

1

and Alex Keena

2



Abstract

Social media has transformed electoral politics and allows campaigns to micro-target supporters. However, little is

known about the effectiveness of political ads on social media, particularly those that appeal for money. We study the

fundraising effects of ad campaigns sponsored by a well-funded Super PAC, The Lincoln Project. Our model include s 100s

of millions of ad impressions targeting Facebook users in the 50 states, plus D.C., over 308 days in 2020. We coded ads

for tone and fundraising appeals and f‌ind that the most effective ads are those that directly appeal for money, while ads

that use negativity are associated with a small, positive effect. Ads that include both negativity and fundraising appeals are

associated with the most money: each impression yields an additional $0.52 in itemized donations (campai gn contri-

butions). The results conf‌irm what previous research on campaign giving has found—people tend to give money to

campaigns when they are asked to—and show how digital advertising inf‌luences political behavior.

Keywords

fundraising, political advertising, digital ads, social media, campaigns, Trump, Super PACs

Social media has become a ubiquitous feature of modern

political campaigning. With tens of millions of users in the

US and lower costs than traditional forms of campaigning,

social media platforms give candidates and campaigns

new forums for microtargeting voters (Dommett and

Power 2019), testing campaign messaging (McGregor

2020), attacking opponents (Auter and Fine 2016;

Endres, Panagopoulos, and Green 2021), and soliciting

donations (Auter and Fine 2018), while skirting tradi-

tional media gatekeepers (see Bimber and Davis 2003;

Druckman, Kifer, and Parkin 2009,2010;Golbeck,

Grimes, and Rogers 2010;Shogan 2010).

Despite the widespread use of social media by political

campaigns, there is little evidence that campaign com-

munications on social media affect political behavior in a

meaningful way. Experimental studies on the effects of

television advertising suggest that anger and fear can

increase interest and intention to vote (Marcus, Neumann,

and MacKuen 2000;Weber 2013;Brader 2005;Brader

2020). However, f‌ield experiments show that the effects of

social media messaging on voting and voter turnout are

small to negligible (Aggarwal et al. 2023;Bond et al.

2012;Coppock, Green, and Porter 2022). Although

campaigns are using social media to solicit campaign

contributions (Auter and Fine 2018;Fowler et al. 2023),

relatively little scholarship has investigated the fund-

raising effects of social media ads.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of social media

ads on campaign contributions received during an elec-

tion. We draw upon an original dataset that combines data

from Facebook’s Ad Library about political ads bought by

political groups and their targeted audiences, with Federal

Election Commission (FEC) campaign contribution re-

ports

1

(Wintersieck and Keena 2023).

16

We study the ad

campaigns launched by one of the largest and most active

Super PACs during the 2020 election, The Lincoln Project

(TLP), which spent millions of dollars on Facebook in

2020 and raised more than $80 million in campaign

1

Department of Political Science, Virginia Commonwealth University,

Richmond, VA, USA

2

Department of Political Science, Virginia Commonwealth University,

Richmond, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Amanda Wintersieck, Department of Political Science, Virginia

Commonwealth University, 827 West Franklin Street, Box 842542,

Richmond, VA 23284-2512, USA.

Email: wintersieal@vcu.edu