Graduation Semester and Year
Spring 2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Marketing
Department
Marketing
First Advisor
Adwait Khare
Abstract
Political ideology has been shown to affect key marketing-relevant outcomes, including purchases, product preferences, and responses to firms’ political as well as apolitical marketing activities. In my dissertation, through two essays, I contribute to this growing literature on political ideology. Essay 1 is dedicated to the creation of a modern (updated) scale measure of political ideology which differentiates the social and economic dimensions. It is in part a response to previous measures and is intended to capture issues which are relevant in today’s political landscape. Across multiple studies in this essay, I provide evidence that the new social and economic conservatism scales are correlated with existing measures of conservatism, with political media consumption preferences, and with self-reported voting behaviors. Essay 2 examines how political ideology shapes consumer responses to gendered product positioning in advertising. The first study in this essay investigates how the match or mismatch between gender-stereotyped products and human characters depicted with the products in Ads affects liberals’ and conservatives’ evaluations of the Ads. The second study in this essay focuses specifically on female-stereotyped products and demonstrates that anti-stereotypical versus stereotypical gender role attitudes mediate the relationship between political ideology and advertisement favorability. The two essays in this dissertation contribute to literature through methodological advancement (new scale development), new findings which can influence advertising-related marketing strategies, and a demonstration of the growing utility of A.I. generated images for research purposes.
Disciplines
Marketing
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
McGaughey, Ray E., "Measuring Political Ideology and Examining its Role in the Evaluation of Ads for Gender-(A)stereotypical Products" (2025). Marketing Dissertations. 57.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/marketing_dissertations/57