Role of Advertising in Forming the Image of Politicians: Comparative Analysis of Poland,France, and Germany

This article presents an analysis of the influence of political advertisements on forming the image of politicians and the voting behavior of citizens. The very important issues are attitude to the candidates and estimation of their personal qualities. After a critical analysis of current models of the influence of political advertisements on the voters, the authors derived the sequential model of the influence of political advertisement on voting behavior. Experiments in three countries were conducted in order to verify this model: Poland (1995 presidential election), France (presidential elections in 1995), and Germany (general election in 1994). The results confirm the dependencies described in the model. The results also allow for distinguishing three types of impact that political advertisements may have on voting decisions: (1) strengthening former voting preferences; (2) weakening the former preferences and their change or reverse in an extreme case; and (3) lack of impact or small fluctuations in voting preferences accompanied by simultaneous reconfiguration of a politician's image in the voters' minds (or reargumentation as far as the motives of one's decision are concerned). The results obtained in the research also allow for deriving a number of practical clues concerning the possibilities of making more efficient political ads.