(Page 2 of 34) - Campaign and Media Attention to an Issue Causes Learning-Based Effects, Not Priming authored by Lenz, Gabriel.

Introduction: the priming hypothesis

Up until the 1980s, research had generally failed to produce much evidence of campaign or media

effects (Graber 1980; Patterson and McClure 1976). This began to change with findings from lab-based
experiments on the effects of television news (Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Iyengar et al. 1984). The authors of
these studies hypothesized that, by calling attention to some matters while ignoring others, television news
alters the issues on which the public judges presidents and candidates for public office, an effect called
priming. To test this hypothesis, they manipulated the extent to which subjects viewed television news stories
on an issue, and found that greater exposure led viewers to give greater weight to that issue when evaluating
politicians. For instance, when shown television news stories about the economy, subjects were more likely
to evaluate the president based on their perceptions of the president’s handling of the economy. Political
scientists have shown great interest in this type of influence (Riker 1986; Schattschneider 1960), also
referring to it as “framing,” “manipulating the dimensions underlying vote choice,” and “heresthetics.”
Schattschneider (1960, 66) writes, for example, “He who determines what politics is about runs the country,
because the definition of the alternatives is the choice of conflicts, and the choice of conflicts allocates
power.”

If campaigns and media coverage can prime issues, then important implications follow for our

scholarly understanding of candidate behavior, elections, and democratic theory. Priming implies, some have
argued, that the media have a power that is mindlessly automatic. For instance, Krosnick and Kinder (1990,
508) characterize people who manifest priming as being “swept away by [an] avalanche of stories and
pictures”, and Iyengar and Kinder (1987) describe individuals who fall prey to priming as “victims.” In terms
of candidate behavior, priming implies that campaigns should pursue strategies that place favorable issues at
the top of the news media’s and the public’s agenda (Petrocik 1996; Simon 2002).

Subsequent studies have consistently supported the lab-based findings, replicating and extending

them, including a number of survey studies that exploit changes in campaign and media attention to issues
between waves of a panel survey (e.g., Johnston et al. 1992; Krosnick and Brannon 1993), in the midst of a
rolling cross-section (e.g., Krosnick and Kinder 1990; Mendelberg 2001; Mutz 1998), or between regions
(e.g., Carsey 2000).

Recent reviews of the literature on public opinion conclude that campaigns and the

media can alter the importance of issues (Iyengar and Simon 2000, 156-157; Kinder 1998a; 1998b).

Earlier

research had even produced some evidence for it. For instance, Truman may have won the 1948 election, to

In some priming studies, real world events—independent of media or campaign attention—could

have caused individuals to place greater weight on an issue. Mueller (1994, 129) discusses the difficulty

distinguishing between the effect of events themselves and the effect of media coverage of those events.

The Social Sciences Citation Index lists 544 articles that cite Iyengar and Kinder (1987).