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Mass Media Agenda Setting and its Electoral Consequences
in the 2002 Primary Campaigns for Texas Governor
The present study addresses how campaigns--more specifically, mass-mediated
campaign communications-- matter to the electoral outcomes, a long-debated issue in the
study of politics. Campaigns are designed to inform citizens, offer them clear and distinct
policy choices to help them make correct decisions, and motivate them to participate in
the electoral process. Campaign effects, therefore, occur in various forms, yet this paper
focuses primarily on the interplays of candidate attributes among the advertising media,
the news media, and the voters, and the electoral consequences of those interplays.
Among various outlets of direct candidate communications, political advertising
accounts for the single biggest campaign expenditure. Ads function as a major strategic
tool for candidates to frame the vote choice as a decision based upon the issues and
images on which they think they are competitive. Candidate ads, therefore, are valuable
lenses through which to see “which considerations the candidates tried to get people to
remember and which techniques they used to communicate these considerations” (Just et
al., 1996, p. 66). While many of the early studies in campaign advertising focused on its
effects on political knowledge (Atkin and Heald, 1976; Patterson and McClure, 1976),
West (2001) criticizes those studies for downplaying the ability of political advertising to
shape the public’s images of political candidates. He points out that exposure to
television ads is critical for citizens to form a variety of impressions, ranging from
candidate recognition to candidate favorability and to candidate electability. Through
these impressions about candidates, according to West, campaign commercials affect the
vote choice.
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