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.     

Is President Obama’s Race Chronically Accessible? Racial Priming in the 2012 Presidential Election

A vast literature indicates that racial animosity has a pervasive influence on the public’s evaluations of U.S. President Barack Obama. Can political communications enhance and/or defuse the link between White Americans’ racial attitudes and evaluations of Barack Obama? In this article, we report the results of an experiment conducted in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign which examines the effect of political rhetoric on the extent to which evaluations of Barack Obama are racialized. Drawing from research on attitude strength and pretreatment effects in experimental studies, we argue that the use of racial appeals in the pretreatment environment and the strength of citizens’ preexisting attitudes toward the incumbent president may produce a downward bias in average estimates of racial priming effects toward President Obama. After accounting for individual differences in the propensity to form strong attitudes with need to evaluate, we observe substantial effects of campaign rhetoric in priming racial attitudes toward President Obama, especially among individuals who are low in the need to evaluate and who tend to have more malleable political attitudes. We conclude by discussing implications for research on racial priming and the politics of racial intolerance in evaluations of Barack Obama.     

Agenda-Setting and Priming in Prime Time Television: Crime Dramas as Political Cues

The effects of agenda-setting and priming are well established in regard to the news media. Considerably less attention has been paid to these phenomena in entertainment media, in spite of the fact that entertainment media enjoy larger audiences than do news media and often address political topics. This article argues that the psychological mechanism hypothesized to lead to agenda-setting and priming effectsthat is, changes in construct accessibilityapplies as equally to entertainment media as it does to news media. Moreover, we contend that the frequency, consistency, and duration of entertainment media treatments of political issues encourage chronic accessibility of those issues. We test these hypotheses looking at television crime dramas as a source of political information. Using data from two controlled laboratory experiments and the 1995 National Election Study Pilot Study, we demonstrate that viewing crime dramas significantly increases concerns about crime and that these concerns significantly affect viewers' opinions of the president. The NES Pilot Study data suggest that these effects are restricted to frequent viewers of crime dramas, supporting a chronic accessibility model of agenda-setting and priming. These findings extend our growing understanding of how non-news sources of political information contribute to the construction of political attitudes.     

Games,Claims, and New Frames: Rethinking the Use of Simulation in Negotiation Education

Negotiation educators have long considered the use of role‐play simulations as an essential classroom teaching method, and have had high expectations regarding their suitability and efficacy for teaching. In this article, we review the literature to examine the degree to which simulations deliver on these perceived benefits, finding that simulations enjoy only limited advantages over other teaching methods. We note three trends that have developed as part of this reevaluation process: improving the way simulations are conducted, deemphasizing the use of simulations as a teaching tool while seeking new methods, and finding paradigm‐changing uses for simulations. With regard to this last trend, we describe our own experiments assigning students to design their own simulations, rather than participate in them as role players. Among other benefits of the design method, we found that designers showed greater improvements in concept learning and motivation than did role players.     

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.     

欧亚经济共同体经济一体化及其效应分析

欧亚经济共同体是以俄罗斯为主导的独联体框架内最重要的经济一体化组织。自2000年诞生以来,该组织在建立关税同盟方面取得了重大实质性进展,建立统一运输空间、统一能源市场和统一社会经济空间的工作稳步推进,金融和货币领域合作有所加强,经济一体化的静态效应、动态效应,以及非传统经济效应和外溢效应开始逐步显现。但由于成员国经济发展水平差距较大,多数成员国的经济规模很小,且共同体内实行的是不同速度的一体化进程,共同体的一体化效应因而又具有一定的局限性。随着欧亚经济共同体内俄白哈关税同盟的正式启动,欧亚经济共同体的一体化效应将明显改观。     

Editor's note

This study applies Elisabeth Noelle‐Neumann's spiral of silence theory to the controversial issue of whether children with AIDS should be allowed to attend public school. The study tests the theory's hypotheses in light of two content analyses of the media's treatment of the issue. The findings offer tentative and qualified support for Noelle‐Neumann's theoretical propositions about the relationship between individuals' perceptions of the issue and the media's tenor of the issue; particularly that of television. The findings suggest the need to address the role of other agents of influence, including reference groups, and to use time‐based data to unravel the causal order of the relationships.     

The Future of Political Communication Research: Reflections on the Occasion of Steve Chaffee's Retirement from Stanford University

Based on the psychological model of media priming, we examine the potentially strong link between news content and public opinion about Governor Patten's democratization plan for Hong Kong. Similar to previous priming studies, we hypothesized that an increase in the amount of media coverage of Patten's political reform plan would cause the public to assign more weight to the issue when evaluating the governor's overall performance. To validate the priming hypothesis in a nonexperimental setting, this study uses time‐series data obtained from 52 weekly public opinion polls, coupled with content analysis of three leading newspapers in Hong Kong between October 1992 and October 1993. The findings provide strong evidence supporting the media priming theory on an aggregate data level. Newspaper coverage of Patten's reform plan greatly inflated the relative importance of his proposal in the public's evaluation of his overall performance, with a 1‐week delay. The priming hypothesis survived a stringent test of several rival factors, including autocorrelation, the influence of the economy, and other important real‐world events.     

A Primer on Problem-Based Learning for International Relations Courses

In recent years advocates of educational reform have encouraged and demanded changes in public education at all levels. A teaching method called active learning addresses many such concerns, promising several advantages to both teachers and students. One version of active learning is called problem-based learning (PBL). PBL is a pedagogically sound, scholastically beneficial, and socially desirable response to concerns about educational reform. According to recent research, PBL is the most effective technique for students to learn, apply, integrate, and retain information. Many students also prefer to learn in this style. Many teachers will find PBL a valuable alternative to current teaching practices. This essay is a brief primer on PBL techniques and resources. Abridged sections survey the structure and process of PBL, discuss the role of teacher as facilitator, describe PBL 'in action' in my courses, and address implementation.     

The Uses and Limits of the Model United Nations in an International Relations Classroom

The Model United Nations, already a mainstay of many undergraduate institutions, not only provides a useful framework for particular classes, but also offers an opportunity to integrate several elements of an undergraduate international studies curriculum. However, it is not without challenges for the instructor. To use the Model United Nations format effectively requires the instructor to plan carefully, coordinate activities with the other elements of a class, and never allow the game to overwhelm the learning. When done correctly, the excitement generated by the Model United Nations can be a key for opening the world to students who might otherwise have drifted through the mandatory introduction to international relations. The process of student teaching student, both within and across courses, is beneficial for the experienced student and the novice alike, encouraging peer interaction and cooperative learning. As an instructional device, the Model UN is not a panacea, but a valuable supplement to more conventional teaching methods.     

The Disruptive and Transformative Potential of Hypertext in the Classroom: Implications for Active Learning

This article describes a further extension of a strategy to move from a teacher-oriented to a student-oriented learning environment through the use of 'collaborative hypertext.' Students were trained in the use of MidasWeb, a Web-based environment for the organization, storage, and retrieval of hypertext documents and images. Over the course of the term students worked in teams to construct their MidasWeb sites by developing the underlying conceptual frameworks for their subject areas and uploading documents. The results of questionnaire surveys of the students suggest that the MidasWeb exercise did achieve our objective of disrupting the traditional relationship between teacher and student to create a more student-centered environment. The more students became involved in the exercise the more they felt empowered with respect to the subject matter of the course and took responsibility for deriving meaning from the information they had obtained. In addition, the experience encouraged them to think about the subject matter across interdisciplinary lines. Because the MidasWeb exercise was structured as a group activity, the effectiveness of the team coordinators had an impact on the success of the teams as well as the nature of the learning experience of the individuals involved. Although the MidasWeb exercise was a successful application of digital technology to classroom learning, it was not a resounding success, because the impact on the students in the course was not uniform. While a substantial majority of them found MidasWeb to be very involving and moved toward student-centered learning, approximately one third of them, especially students who were uncomfortable with computer technology, did not benefit fully from the exercise. This suggests that in the future more time should be spent on training, and that MidasWeb needs to be made more user friendly for unsophisticated users.     

马来西亚的马来人教育：发展与影响

本文试图从马来人的角度,探讨马来西亚族群教育及其对社会发展的影响,分析马来西亚政府的马来人教育政策,包括教育马来化、高等教育优先、财政支持等,分析马来人普及教育和高等教育的发展,以及教育发展对马来人职业和收入的影响。本文认为,马来人教育发展及随之而至的相对畅通的社会流动机制,在某种程度上有利于各族群和睦相处和社会稳定发展,如果政府在教育资源的分配上,能公平对待其他族群,族群之间的关系将更融合,社会发展也将更稳定。     

Intra-Campaign Changes in Voting Preferences: The Impact of Media and Party Communication

An increasing number of citizens change and adapt their party preferences during the electoral campaign. We analyze which short-term factors explain intra-campaign changes in voting preferences, focusing on the visibility and tone of news media reporting and party canvassing. Our analyses rely on an integrative data approach, linking data from media content analysis to public opinion data. This enables us to investigate the relative impact of news media reporting as well as party communication. Inherently, we overcome previously identified methodological problems in the study of communication effects on voting behavior. Our findings reveal that campaigns matter: Especially interpersonal party canvassing increases voters’ likelihood to change their voting preferences in favor of the respective party, whereas media effects are limited to quality news outlets and depend on individual voters’ party ambivalence.     

How Accurate Are Survey Responses on Social Media and Politics?

How accurate are survey-based measures of social media use, in particular about political topics? We answer this question by linking original survey data collected during the U.S. 2016 election campaign with respondents’ observed social media activity. We use supervised machine learning to classify whether these Twitter and Facebook account data are content related to politics. We then benchmark our survey measures on frequency of posting about politics and the number of political figures followed. We find that, on average, our self-reported survey measures tend to correlate with observed social media activity. At the same time, we also find a worrying amount of individual-level discrepancy and problems related to extreme outliers. Our recommendations are twofold. The first is for survey questions about social media use to provide respondents with options covering a wider range of activity, especially in the long tail. The second is for survey questions to include specific content and anchors defining what it means for a post to be “about politics.”     

The Mix of Media Use Matters: Investigating the Effects of Individual News Repertoires on Offline and Online Political Participation

In contemporary high-choice media environments, people increasingly mix and combine their use of various news media into personal news repertoires. Despite this, there is still limited research on how people compose their individual news repertoires and the effects of these news repertoires. To address this and further our understanding of how media use influences political participation, this study investigates (a) how people combine the use of offline and online media into personal news repertoires and (b) the effects of different news repertoires on both offline and online political participation. Based on a two-wave panel study covering the 2014 Swedish national election, this study identifies five news repertoires, labeled minimalists, public news consumers, local news consumers, social media news consumers, and popular online news consumers. Among other things, the results show that social media news consumers are more likely to participate in politics both offline and online.