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People possess little incentive to become well informed about candidates.
Although unlikely to actively search for campaign information, people receive
information about candidates and issue positions in the course of their normal television
viewing habits. Not everyone receives the same amount of information. Through
advertising, campaigns bombard some media markets with these messages while ignoring
others. A person in one media market with a high degree of interest in politics may
receive very few campaign advertising messages while a person in another media market
with very little interest in politics may find themselves facing a steady stream of
campaign messages. The latter may unwittingly pick up some of this information – can
they recall it once advertising ends?
In previous work (Rice 2004), I found that people exposed to more advertising by
finding did not hold, however, for those whose contest had already occurred and yet
continued to receive exposure to campaign advertising because the media market in
which they resided was based in another state. This did not, as one might surmise, reflect
that all of these respondents had nothing left to learn. Some respondents gave incorrect
answers to candidate knowledge questions after their contest despite such often heavy
and prolonged advertising within their media market. This suggests that we cannot
dismiss the lack of significance for advertising after a respondent’s contest as due to all
of the respondents already knowing the information contained within them; they did not
all give correct answers. Residents in New Hampshire, for example, should have learned
the correct answers from advertising aired prior to their contest and yet, when surveyed a
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Provided, of course, that the information emphasized in the advertisements included the correct answer to
the question.
Convention