From red carpets to rallies: exploring celebrity political endorsements for local and state candidates
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
Currently, the literature on celebrity political endorsements debates the effectiveness of endorsements and has focused less on other aspects, such as the promotion, content, or narratives of the endorsements. Furthermore, the characteristics of successful celebrity endorsers have also been largely ignored. This thesis attempts to fill some of these gaps by conducting comparative case studies of celebrity endorsements made for local and state candidates Beto O’Rourke, Stacey Abrams, and Karen Bass in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections. I hypothesize that celebrity endorsements matter for candidates, given the different characteristics of the endorsement and the endorser. These characteristics include timing, type of endorsements, shared racial identity, and expertise. After developing a comprehensive dataset that recorded and categorized each characteristic of the celebrity endorsements and endorsers, I performed a descriptive analysis of the endorsements across all three candidates and recorded observations and patterns from each case. From the case studies, this thesis finds that celebrity endorsements matter more for emerging candidates, that certain types of endorsements are vital for expanding the candidate’s audience, and that the perceived expertise of the celebrity endorsers holds a strong association with the outcomes of a candidate’s campaign.
Description
2024
License
Attribution 4.0 International