Media Effects on Voters’ Political Attention, Preference, and Judgment
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elections. While in presidential elections news media allot excessive resources for the
campaign coverage, candidates also devote astronomical figures of money to political
advertising and the voters become more involved in political conversations with their
friends, family, and colleagues, diluting the media effects. In local-level elections, voters
relatively know so little about their candidates, and thus news about the candidates could
play a crucial role of directing the evolution of campaign agendas in the public’s minds
(Geer & Kahn, 1993). In local settings, the voters may have loose schemata about their
candidates, which should be tightly [re]constructed with new information about them to
reach voting decisions. Because voters have less prior knowledge about the candidates
running for state or local office and subsequent weaker preferences toward them, the
supplies from news media could be an important trigger for voters’ political attention,
preference, and even behavior. The 2002 Texas gubernatorial election is an excellent case
to study the news media’s role of informing voters and directing their decision-making:
both the Republican and Democrat candidates are the first-time runners for the job of
governor.
This study, in the setting of the 2002 Texas primary election for governor, explores
the influence of news coverage of the primary campaigns by The Austin American-
Statesmen, the only major Austin area daily, on the voters’ attribute campaign agenda and
their criteria of candidate selection. How is the salience of attribute agendas about the
political candidates in the newspaper related to the importance of those attributes in the
voters’ mind? And how does the emphasis of those attributes in the news media direct the
voters’ decision-making? To answer these questions, this study bases its analysis on two
Convention