• The Washington Post, Thursday, November 16, 2006 11:31 AM

The 2006 election cycle set a record for the amount of money spent on campaign advertising in an off-year. The tone of the ads reached new lows, with candidates and the parties often resorting heavily to harsh personal attacks. But they may not have worked.

Stanford University's Political Communication Lab designed an online experiment in which voters from seven battleground states watched a pair of either negative or positive ads--one from each candidate--and indicated how they felt about the content of the ad by continuously moving a slider from 0 (strong negative reactions) to 100 (strong positive feelings).

The results included a few surprises, writes Shanto Iyengar, a professor of communication and political science at Stanford University. "Even though negative ads did reliably accomplish their immediate objective--making the opposing candidate appear less attractive--positive ads had the stronger impact on vote choice."

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