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Mass media reports fulfill several important functions during political campaigns and elections,
including setting the political agenda and providing information to individuals. Yet media consumers are
not entirely at the mercy of press reporting. Recent research suggests that voters are able to find meaning
in the media messages and relate information to their own beliefs and experiences. Interpretation of
media reporting is an important step in a voter’s decision-making process.
Overloaded with information, voters in a complex world may use political ideology as a shortcut to
information processing. Ideology serves as the link between political communication and vote choice.
The spatial theory of voting was developed as a tool to understand the relative roles of partisanship,
issues and ideology in voter decision-making. Distance between an individual voter’s position and
perceived candidate placements on issue scales measure the preference a voter has for a candidate on that
political issue. Survey data can used to construct an ideological map of voter perceptions of candidates in
an n-dimensional policy space. Empirical tests of spatial models have shown the theory to be quite
successful and powerful. Even simple measures such as thermometer score ratings (numbers from 0 to
100) of known political figures are quite successful in the construction of ideological maps.
How do political messages from the media and voter perceptions of the press and reporters fit
within the spatial model? This paper begins to incorporate voters’ media consumption and perceptions
into a spatial model of ideology. An extension of the spatial theory of ideology suggests that political
communication can be accurately incorporated with political science models.
The role of information is the key to understanding the relationship between the press and
individuals, particularly in election campaigns. An improved theory of political communication should
incorporate spatial models of ideology and voting from political science into mass communication
research. This paper conducts theoretical and empirical explorations of a spatial model of political
communication. The focus of this paper is exclusively on British newspapers and elections. The British
political environment offers an excellent case study as most national newspapers espouse clear partisan
preferences and national elections are decided primarily by partisanship (rather than candidate-centered
elections).
Convention