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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.