Priming Issues,Party Visibility,and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Voter volatility has become a hallmark of Western democracies in the past three decades. At the same time short-term factors—such as the media’s coverage of issues, parties, and candidates during an election campaign—have become more important for voters’ decisions. While previous research did look at how campaign news in general affects electoral volatility in general, it has omitted to explicitly test the mechanisms underlying these effects. Building on theories of agenda setting, (affective) priming, and issue ownership, the current study aims to explain why certain news aspects lead voters to switch their vote choice. We theorize it is the visibility of a party, the evaluation of a party, and the attention for issues owned by a party that primes voters to switch to a certain party. We use national panel survey data (N = 765) and link this to an extensive content analysis of campaign news on television and in newspapers in the run up to the 2012 Dutch national elections. The results show that issue news leads to vote change in the direction of the party that owns the issue. Even stronger is the effect of party visibility on vote switching. Our results, however, find the strongest support for the effect of party evaluations on vote change: More favorable news about a party increases switching to that party.     

Any Publicity or Good Publicity? A Competitive Test of Visibility- and Tonality-Based Media Effects on Voting Behavior

When examining media effects on voting intentions, scholars of political communication have either focused on visibility- or tonality-based effects. Our study compares these effect models, asking whether the explanations are complementary or competitive; it goes beyond previous studies by considering interactions between media cues and voters’ attitudes. We draw on panel survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) that is combined with content analysis data of the main evening news broadcast in Germany. Findings show that visibility- and tonality-based effects are similar in potency, but tone-based effects are more contingent on attitudes toward parties and candidates. Both types of cues can backfire: higher visibility and more positive tonality can have negative effects on some attitude groups, which is in part moderated by the expectations about government coalitions. We find that visibility and tonality are rather complementary cues that both influence voting behavior. Implications are discussed.     

Early Voting and Campaign News Coverage

The proportion of votes cast before election day has risen steadily over the last two decades. Previous research asked how early voting has impacted voter participation. In this article, we ask how early voting has affected the flow of information to voters through the mass media. By increasing the number of days voters are able to vote, are we also increasing the number of days that candidates and campaigns continuously disseminate campaign-related information to the news media? Is news coverage of campaigns quantitatively and qualitatively different when opportunities to vote early are available and utilized? Our expectation is that early voting significantly influences the volume and nature of campaign news coverage. We study the effects of early voting on campaign news coverage of gubernatorial and Senate races in 2006 and 2008. Our findings reveal that the volume and content of campaign news coverage is significantly influenced by early voting.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource: Appendix for Early Voting and Campaign News Coverage—Alternative Model Specifications.]     

Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare's End,by Nina Eliasoph

Extant research is not very specific about when the media matter for vote choice. In this study, we test multiple theories about the influences of the media on vote choice in 21 countries. The European Parliamentary (EP) election campaign offers a unique research context to test these influences. We rely on a two-wave panel survey conducted in 21 European Union (EU) member states, asking both vote intentions before the campaign and reported actual votes (among 14,000 voters). We link these data to media content data of campaign coverage between the two waves in these countries (37,000 coded news items). We conclude that media evaluations of the EU affect voting for Eurosceptic parties. On average, the more positive the evaluations of the EU a voter is exposed to, the less likely she or he is to cast a vote for a Eurosceptic party. In addition, our findings indicate that in countries where political parties have markedly different views on EU issues, the more a voter is exposed to framing of the EU in terms of benefits derived from membership in these countries, the less likely she or he is to cast a Eurosceptic vote. This suggests that the outcome of the 2009 EP elections was influenced by how the media covered EU-related news during the campaign.     

Immeasurable Pleasure and Meaningful Imperfection: Raising Good Citizens in a Bad State

Previous research has shown that a party's election results can depend on visibility and tone in the media. Using daily content data from the major news bulletins and daily survey data from the 2007 national election campaign in Denmark (N = 5,083), our analysis improves upon two central aspects of this earlier research. First, the effects on vote choice of the parties' visibility and tone in the media are studied concurrently in the same model. Second, a distinction is made between the effects of direct exposure to specific news content and the effects of the cumulative information environment created by the media. Overall, it is found that the more visible and the more positive the tone toward a given party is, the more voters are inclined to vote for this party. The effects are primarily effects of the information environment, not effects of direct exposure, though undecided voters are also directly affected. In the discussion, central conditions for the strength of media effects are identified.     

The (In)stability of Voters’ Perceptions of Competence and Associative Issue Ownership: The Role of Media Campaign Coverage

Recent work has suggested that issue ownership has a competence and an associative dimension and that both dimensions are less stable than originally assumed. This study is the first attempt to directly compare the stability and change of voters’ perceptions on both dimensions. Using data from the 2015 Swiss Election Study, linking data from a combined panel/rolling cross-section survey with an extensive media analysis, this study finds that voters are more likely to maintain their issue ownership perceptions if the party they identify as the issue owner before the campaign receives a higher share of media campaign coverage. This stabilizing effect is conditional on the importance of the issue for the voter, and it is stronger for voters’ competence evaluations than for their party-issue associations, which proved to be more stable. Thus, the results confirm the literature’s previously untested assumption that voters’ associative ownership perceptions are more stable than their competence ownership evaluations.     

The Combined Effect of Advertising and News Coverage in the Mexican Presidential Campaign of 2000

In July 2000, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) lost the presidency of Mexico after 71 years of continuous rule. Research based on individual data obtained with surveys shows that important media effects occurred. Using aggregate data, in this article the author explores the effects of political advertising and media coverage on preferences during the Mexican presidential campaign. Data on voter preferences are taken from results of a trial ballot question in public opinion polls. Data on advertising are measured in gross rating points. Data on media coverage are taken from the monitoring of newscasts on the two major networks. OLS regression models are developed, with preferences as the dependent variable and campaigning differentials as the independent variables. Based on aggregate data, this research shows that in Mexico's 2000 presidential campaign, exposure to political communication led to persuasion, and news appears to have been more important than ads. Political communication was a unified process where ads and news presence acted together in a very interesting fashion, “bounding” each other in periods of major changes in preferences but with news effects prevailing over ads. Qualified news differentials accounted for 20% of the variance in preferences, and ad differentials accounted for 8%. This media effect occurred through a cumulative process where ads and news coverage acted together.     

Campaigns Matter: How Voters Become Knowledgeable and Efficacious During Election Campaigns

Election campaigns are more than simple competitions for votes; they also represent an opportunity for voters to become politically knowledgeable and engaged. Using a large-scale Web panel (N ≈ 5,000), we track the development of political knowledge, internal efficacy, and external efficacy among voters during the 2011 Danish parliamentary election campaign. Over the course of the campaign, the electorate’s political knowledge increases, and these gains are found across genders, generations, and educational groups, narrowing the knowledge gap within the electorate. Furthermore, internal and external efficacy increase over the course of the campaign, with gains found across different demographic groups, particularly narrowing the gaps in internal efficacy. The news media play a crucial role, as increased knowledge and efficacy are partly driven by media use, although tabloids actually decrease external efficacy. The findings suggest that positive campaign effects are universal across various media and party systems.     

Tools of single party hegemony in Tanzania: evidence from surveys and survey experiments

Political systems dominated by a single party are common in the developing world, including in countries that hold regular elections. Yet we lack knowledge about the strategies by which these regimes maintain political dominance. This article presents evidence from Tanzania, a paradigmatic dominant party regime, to demonstrate how party institutions are used instrumentally to ensure the regime's sustained control. First, I show that the ruling party maintains a large infrastructure of neighbourhood representatives, and that in the presence of these agents, citizens self-censor about their political views. Second, I provide estimates of the frequency with which politicians give goods to voters around elections, demonstrating that such gifts are more common in Tanzania than previous surveys suggest. Third, I use a survey experiment to test respondents’ reaction to information about corruption. Few voters change their preferences upon receipt of this information. Taken together, this article provides a detailed picture of ruling party activities at the micro-level in Tanzania. Citizens conceal opposition sympathies from ten cell leaders, either because they fear punishment or seek benefits. These party agents can monitor citizens’ political views, facilitating clientelist exchange. Finally, citizens’ relative insensitivity to clientelism helps explain why politicians are not punished for these strategies.     

Explaining ethnic bloc voting in Africa

What explains bloc voting among ethnic groups in Africa? Using the Herfindahl Hirschman Index of Concentration on partisan preference data from the Afrobarometer, this article tests several hypotheses regarding the explanation as to why some ethnic groups: (1) express voting preferences as a bloc; (2) express voting preferences as a bloc for the governing party or the opposition. This article found that the geographic concentration of the group best explained general bloc voting. In terms of the direction of support, the degree to which a group is discriminated against and politically mobilized explains bloc voting against the governing party, whereas bloc voting for the governing party is explained by the extent to which the governing party is politically dominant. This suggests that the prospects for patronage helps explain voting as a bloc for most all groups, except those that face discrimination and are politically mobilized.     

Does Media Coverage of Partisan Polarization Affect Political Attitudes?

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the partisan polarization of the American electorate. Scholarly investigation of this topic has coincided with the media’s portrayal of a polity deeply divided along partisan lines. Yet little research so far has considered the consequences of the media’s coverage of political polarization. We show that media coverage of polarization increases citizens’ beliefs that the electorate is polarized. Furthermore, the media’s depiction of a polarized electorate causes voters to moderate their own issue positions but increases their dislike of the opposing party. These empirical patterns are consistent with our theoretical argument that polarized exemplars in journalistic coverage serve as anti-cues to media consumers. Our findings have important implications for understanding current and future trends in political polarization.     

Economic Voting Appeals in Congressional Campaigns

Although they agree that economics and elections are intertwined, theories of economic voting disagree on the policy focus (on positions taken or outcomes achieved) and time horizon (retrospective or prospective) that guides voters’ decisions. Most research on these debates looks at the considerations voters weigh. Instead, I explore the types of economic voting that candidates encourage through their campaign appeals. Content-coded advertising data from the 2004 congressional elections show that appeals focus more on policy positions than outcomes and more on the past than the future. Consistent with predictions from emphasis allocation theory, strategic incentives and electoral context shape the exact mix of economic appeals campaigns make. When promoting their own candidacy, politicians ask voters to think about (more unifying) future economic outcomes; when attacking their opponent’s candidacy, they ask voters to think about (more divisive) past policy positions. In districts experiencing worsening economic conditions, voters are exposed to more information about policy outcomes; in districts where the incumbent is ideologically “out of step,” they hear more about policy positions. Studies that seek to evaluate competing theories of economic voting are thus likely to draw misleading conclusions if they treat the information environment as a homogeneous constant: Campaigns in different districts, facing different strategic incentives, encourage significantly different types of economic voting.     

Scary Pictures: How Terrorism Imagery Affects Voter Evaluations

Journalists, candidates, and scholars believe that images, particularly images of war, affect the way that the public evaluates political leaders and foreign policy itself, but there is little direct evidence on the circumstances under which political elites can use imagery to enhance their electoral chances. Using National Election Studies (NES) panel data as well as two experiments, this article shows that, contrary to concerns about the manipulative power of imagery, the effect of evocative imagery can enhance candidate evaluations across partisan lines when they originate from the news but are more limited when they are used for persuasive purposes. By looking over time, the three data sets demonstrate different circumstances in which terrorism images have different effects on candidate evaluations—crisis versus non-crisis times and through news exposure versus direct use by a candidate. The NES data reveal that exposure to watching the World Trade Center fall on television increased positive evaluations of George W. Bush and the Republican party across partisan boundaries in 2002 and 2004. The news experiment that exposed subjects to graphic terrorism news in a lab in 2005/2006 increased approval of Bush’s handling of terrorism among Democrats. Lastly, an experiment where hypothetical candidates utilized terrorism images in campaign communication in 2008 demonstrates that both parties’ candidates can improve evaluations of their foreign policy statements by linking those statements to evocative imagery, but it is more effective among their own party members.     

Partisan Bias in Message Selection: Media Gatekeeping of Party Press Releases

Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general.     

Electoral system effects re-examined using the largest vote share variable

In the search for a less controversial pattern between electoral systems and party systems, especially the institutional conditions for multipartism, this article develops and analyses a complete post-war dataset on largest parties’ vote shares. In contrast to the vague wording in the Duvergerian literature, it defends a strong proposition that majority parties are almost always a result of disproportionality. With some rare exceptions, they are either manufactured (without a majority of popular votes) or, less frequently, held together by heterogeneous groups (indicated either by a large number of swing voters or an exceptionally restrictive system) through strategic voting. I explain the phenomenon using a theory on politicians’ incentive for office turnover and voters’ demand for party accountability, and also theorize why South Africa and Namibia are the only two outliers to the pattern.     

What Makes Party Messages Fit for Reporting? An Experimental Study of Journalistic News Selection

Studies on news values have provided many insights into what gets reported in the media. In this study we use the concept of news values to examine how journalists perceive the newsworthiness of party messages. Taking an innovative approach, fictional party press releases are used to test for the influence of five important news values in the context of political news in a factorial survey experiment. This allows us to study those news values in relation to one another in a controlled experimental setting, an advantage over traditional gatekeeping studies. Political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands were asked to indicate whether they would consider these press releases for reporting or not. Findings show that the power status of the party, unexpectedness, and the magnitude of the political action announced influence journalists’ perception of newsworthiness. Messages from parties that were part of government were more likely to be selected for coverage in the Netherlands, whereas the party did not matter in Switzerland, where power is distributed more evenly. This shows that political system characteristics influence the work of journalists. Opposed to results from content analyses of news output, some news values (personal status, conflict) did not prove to be relevant. In the conclusion section we elaborate on potential explanations.     

How Much Is Too Much? Media Attention and Popular Support for an Insurgent Party

It is commonly observed that parties and candidates tend to receive coverage in the news media and attention in proportion to their electoral support. Although this norm serves to ensure that coverage is balanced or fair, news values often produce a different pattern of coverage in the television news media. This article considers the dynamic relationship between coverage in the news media and popular support for an insurgent party - the Reform party - in the 1993 Canadian election campaign. The analysis shows that coverage of Reform in the news media underwent an important change during the campaign that appears to have occurred before any change in popular support. While this change in attention to Reform was critical for Reform's ability to mobilize its potential electoral support, it also provides empirical support for the argument that there is an underlying equilibrium between the amount of coverage a party receives and its political support. Data for this analysis come from a campaign wave survey of vote intentions as part of the 1993 Canadian Election Study and a television content analysis of campaign news. The analysis applies an error-correction approach, which assumes an underlying equilibrium relationship, to model media access and vote intentions. The article thus expands the current applications of the error-correction technique while offering substantively important evidence of the political impacts of media decisions for the electoral support of new parties.     

How the Media Shape Perceptions of Right-Wing Populist Leaders

It is often argued that right-wing populist party leaders are dependent on the media for their public image, which in turn is key for their electoral success. This study tests this assumption by comparing the effects of the media coverage of 2 Dutch right-wing populist leaders with the effects of the coverage of leaders of established parties, in a real-life setting, by tracking campaign developments in the Dutch 2006 national election campaign. We combine panel survey data (n?=?401) with repeated measurements of the party leaders' public images with a systematic content analysis of 17 media outlets (with a total of 1,001 stories), on the basis of the media consumption of individual respondents. Our results show significant effects of the content of media coverage on the public image of political leaders. However, only in 1 case (out of 10) is there a significant difference between right-wing populist party leaders and leaders of other parties in the strength of media effects. It thus seems that leaders of right-wing populist parties are just as dependent upon the media as leaders of other parties. The findings are discussed in the light of extant research on right-wing populist parties and media populism.     

The Contingency of Voter Learning: How Election Debates Influenced Voters’ Ability and Accuracy to Position Parties in the 2010 Dutch Election Campaign

Election campaigns are expected to inform voters about parties’ issue positions, thereby increasing voters’ ability to influence future policy and thus enhancing the practice of democratic government. We argue that campaign learning is not only contingent on voters’ characteristics and different sources of information, but also on how parties communicate their issue positions in election debates. We combine a two-wave panel survey with content analysis data of three televised election debates. In cross-classified multilevel auto-regression models we examine the influence of these debates in the 2010 Dutch parliamentary election campaign on voters’ knowledge of the positions of eight parties on three issues. The Dutch multiparty system allows us to separate voters’ ability to position parties from their accuracy in ordering these parties. We reach three main conclusions. First, this study shows that voters become more able and accurate during the campaign. However, these campaign learning effects erode after the elections. Second, whereas voters’ attention to campaigns consistently contributes to their ability to position parties, its effect on accuracy is somewhat less consistent. Third, televised election debates contribute to what voters learn. Parties that advocate their issue positions in the debates stimulate debate viewers’ ability to position these parties on these issues. In the face of the complexity of campaigns and debates in multiparty systems, campaigns are more likely to boost voters’ subjective ability to position parties than their accuracy.     

Compensator,Amplifier, or Distractor? The Moderating Role of Informal Political Talk on the Effect of News Media Use on Current-Affairs Learning Among First-Time Voters

With an increasing number of young people turning away from traditional news sources, an important question for democracy is whether alternative sources can help learning about politics and current affairs. In this study, we examine to what extent informal political talk with friends, family, and peers narrows or widens knowledge gaps amongst young people by compensating those with low news media use (“helping the poor”), amplifying news media effects amongst those with high news media use (“the rich get richer”), or distracting those with high news media use (“taxing the rich”). To test these different potentials, we take advantage of a four-wave panel study fielded ahead of the Danish National Election in 2015 among a sample of Danish first-time voters (ages 17 to 21). Our results show that informal political talk functions mostly as a compensator by informing those with low news media use about current political affairs and thereby helps decrease knowledge gaps caused by different levels of news media use.