Knight Foundation supports the Wesleyan Media Project to help more Americans engage in elections by tracking and analyzing all broadcast advertisements aired by or on behalf of federal and state election candidates in every media market in the country. Below, Erika Franklin Fowler, assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, writes about the work. Photo credit: Flickr user flash.pro.

You don’t need to pay much attention to politics to know that the airwaves – in competitive races at least – are chock-full of negative ads during elections. You know because you probably have trouble avoiding them! What you may not pay as much attention to is the source of the negativity. And what many of us – even those like us who track political ads for a living – often have trouble determining is who is funding much of this advertising. The reason? A lack of transparency in U.S. elections.

Interest group involvement in TV advertising has grown in recent years thanks to the relaxation of campaign finance rules that allows for unlimited spending. It’s unclear that much will change despite the recent Supreme Court ruling removing aggregate caps on direct contributions because there are multiple incentives for people to funnel money through outside interest groups.

For one, attack ads by interest groups have been shown to be more effective than identical ads sponsored by candidates. One reason is that interest group sponsorship shields candidates from the backlash that can occur from airing a negative attack. In addition, although the Federal Election Commission requires interest groups to report their spending, it only requires such reports during certain windows prior to primary and general elections. And more importantly, much of this reporting happens after elections when it is too late for citizens to take the information into account in the voting booth. Furthermore, despite the reporting requirements for spending, a large and growing subset of outside interest groups – those referred to as social-welfare organizations – are not required to disclose their donors, leaving Americans in the dark about who is funding efforts to affect electoral outcomes.

This is a problem. Democracy and governmental responsiveness depend upon the ability of citizens to hold their elected officials accountable, which at a minimum should include the ability to assess who is attempting to influence elections, what is being said and which candidates are benefiting. Survey evidence suggests Americans have heard very little about even the most prominent interest group advertisers on the airwaves, and growing academic research demonstrates that advertising from “unknown” groups (those with generic names that don’t disclose their donors) is more effective than both ads from candidates and ads from “known” groups. Yet we also know that increased information about unknown groups can help blunt the effectiveness of their messages.

Our goal at the Wesleyan Media Project is to provide more transparency in elections by releasing real-time information on the sponsors, content and targeting of political advertising and to help increase awareness about “unknown” interest groups. This year, we are partnering with the Center for Responsive Politics to provide even more information on the interest group advertisers in particular. We’ll be looking at the proportion of interest group advertising that comes from those who do and do not disclose their donors.

The continued support of Knight Foundation and Wesleyan University helps us achieve these goals. As we head into the midterm elections this year and gear up for the presidential election in 2016, we believe it’s essential for voters to know who is funding the advertisements that will flood the airwaves.