Professor of Political Science Jacob Montgomery has co-authored an article for the Journal of Experimental Political Science titled, "What Drives Perceptions of the Political in Online Advertising?: The Source, Content, and Political Orientation." The article looks at the methods for defining what makes a digital ad "political" in an attempt to provide benchmarks for "evaluating proposed definitions of political ads from policymakers and platforms." Montgomery co-authored the article with Laura Edelson (Northeastern), WashU Political Science PhD Dominique Lockett, PhD student Celia Guillard (Cornell), WashU PhD student Zhaozhi Li, Tobias Lauinger (Northeastern), and Damon McCoy (NYU). 

Read the article's abstract below and the full article on the journal's website. 

Abstract:

As digital platforms become a key channel for political advertising, there are continued calls for expanding regulation of digital political ads as a distinct content category. However, designing policies to meet these demands requires us first to decipher what the public perceives a “political” ad to be. In this article, we report two preregistered experiments to understand factors that drive public perceptions of what makes an ad political. We find that both advertiser-level cues and content-level cues play an independent role in shaping perceptions. To a lesser extent, participants also attribute political meaning to ads that clash with their own preferences. These patterns were replicated in a conjoint study using artificial ads and in an experiment using real-world ads drawn from the Facebook Ad Library. Our findings serve as an important benchmark for evaluating proposed definitions of political ads from policymakers and platforms.