On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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Political science research consistently shows that political advertisements have small and uniform effects. This contrasts with claims that microtargeted campaigning can sway electoral outcomes and poses a threat to society. This paper introduces a novel experimental design simulating a targeted campaign to empirically test whether targeting political advertisements can be effective. Participants in an online survey experiment view one of five anti-Biden advertisements. Respondents assigned to control are allocated advertisements at random. This data is used to train a model predicting Biden favorability from advertisement and pre-treatment traits. Respondents in the treatment group view the advertisement that this model predicts to be the most effective. The difference between targeted and random allocation is an 8.7 percentage point increase in Biden dislike and a 7.1 percentage point decrease in intent to vote Biden among unaligned voters who had not yet cast their vote (N=586). The effect is negligible among partisan voters.
