USA 2024: Can celebrity endorsements tip the scales?

FRANCE 24 English

Visit our website: http://www.france24.com  Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/France24_en

Transcript

00:00Celebrity endorsements have long been in the picture of presidential elections,

00:04helping drive more attention, funding and enthusiasm to candidates' campaigns.

00:08While a new study has found that celebrities do more than generate online buzz.

00:13They have the power to influence elections to a certain extent.

00:17Well, to discuss, we can bring in Allison Shortall.

00:19She's the associate professor at the University of Oklahoma.

00:23Thank you so much for joining us on the program.

00:26Thanks for having me.

00:27I'll start by asking your opinion on how important celebrity endorsements are

00:32and whether they actually make a difference in voters' minds.

00:36Well, it's a great question.

00:39We are a little unclear on it at this point in time.

00:43What we typically think as political scientists is that things like partisanship,

00:48the economy matter much more than things like celebrity endorsements.

00:53But in recent years with elections with such tight margins,

00:57we start looking at these marginal effects, especially on mobilization

01:02that maybe celebrity endorsements can have for particular candidates.

01:07And these endorsements by by stars and influencers do create a huge buzz.

01:12I want to take the example of Taylor Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris

01:16and generated massive online traffic.

01:19What makes people act in these stars' footsteps?

01:21I mean, is it just that they are admired and looked up to and want to have

01:25something in common, perhaps with the stars they love?

01:28Well, again, it's a complicated story.

01:32Taylor Swift came out on Instagram, a popular social media site

01:37in favor of Kamala Harris and likely and certainly according to my colleagues

01:42and I who ran a study on a Taylor Swift endorsement.

01:46The people who are looking at these are mainly Taylor Swift fans.

01:50So you have to ask yourself, one,

01:53who are Taylor Swift fans politically?

01:56Are they even political?

01:58And then, two, out of those political Taylor Swift fans,

02:02what effect is this endorsement really having relative to things

02:06like an endorsement from a politician, an endorsement from an interest group?

02:10In the study that I ran with my colleagues, Brooklyn Walker

02:14at Hutchinson College and Mark Harvey, who is at the University of St.

02:18Mary, we actually found using an experiment on a survey of over a thousand

02:23Americans that the endorsement from Taylor Swift,

02:28which was ran before the actual endorsement, so it wasn't polluted

02:32by already the media spin about this endorsement,

02:35we found that a partisan endorsement actually decreased

02:41voters' likelihood to turn out to vote

02:44if they were specifically Taylor Swift fans that were undecided voters.

02:49Now, this is really important because these are the voters

02:52that someone like Kamala Harris needs

02:57to benefit from with these particular endorsements.

03:01And more generally speaking, why do why do celebrities do this?

03:04What's what's in it for them to get involved in politics?

03:08Well, I think there's a variety of motivations here.

03:11Partially, this is something that might be personally important to these people.

03:16Certainly, if you watch Taylor Swift's entertainment,

03:19some of her documentaries, as well as her her general speeches

03:24and information she puts online, she will say that this is personally important to her.

03:29She has come out against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump.

03:33She has a distaste for his politics.

03:36She also supports liberal politics in general,

03:39and she's a huge supporter of LGBT rights as well as reproductive rights,

03:44which Donald Trump has bragged about taking away.

03:49And are there different age groups that are more influenced by celebrities, do you think?

03:54Well, I think that there should be.

03:58When we look at young voters in the U.S.,

04:01you can look to Melissa Deckman's work on the Gen Z politics.

04:04She just published a book on this.

04:06And what she found is that young people who identify as LGBT, as well as young women,

04:12are much more likely to be politically engaged than young men today.

04:16And they're also very likely to hold progressive viewpoints.

04:20So taken together, we do see that these young voters,

04:24particularly women and LGBT identifying young people,

04:28are likely to respond to progressive messaging in particular.

04:33Now, I haven't found that in my data yet,

04:36but I do think it speaks to the fact that we don't have as large

04:40a population of voters in the Gen Z cohort.

04:43But in future years, this likely will make a larger impact.

04:48I want to expand on what you just said about Gen Z, because, you know,

04:51celebrity endorsements are obviously not new in the history of presidential elections,

04:55but influences are new to the scene.

04:57I was wondering how much influence do influences wield,

05:01especially among the Gen Z, who are this cycle's youngest demographic?

05:06It's pretty hard to say, largely because young voters are not as participatory

05:12in general as people who have been voting in several elections.

05:16And we just have less data on how they're behaving.

05:20And the data that we do have, we focus on this gap between different populations.

05:25As a result, we don't know what the future holds exactly.

05:29But we do think that young people are mired in more social media content.

05:35Their entire informational ecosystem is completely different

05:39than the generations before them.

05:41I'll give you an example.

05:42You can imagine boomer generation.

05:45Americans are very much getting most of their information from TV news.

05:49And for a long time, people thought television news

05:53was where people are getting their information.

05:55I have run recent data of the local news ecosystem in the state of Oklahoma,

06:02finding that most people are going to social media to get their information.

06:07And young people in particular tell me that they're going to TikTok now,

06:11whereas even millennials were going to Instagram.

06:15So it changes generation by generation where they're getting this information

06:20and how that affects their politics is still really uncertain at this time.

06:25But we absolutely know that their informational environment

06:28is different than ever before.

06:31All right.

06:31I think I think that data checks out because I myself am a millennial

06:34and I don't have TikTok, I go on Instagram.

06:38Alison Shortall, associate professor at the University of Oklahoma,

06:41thank you so much for joining us on the program and for your time.

Category

Transcript

Recommended