Page 237 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

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affect (Lodge & Taber, 2000), and expanded models of political choices
and information reflecting a blend of rational choice and social-
psychological models (Lupia, McCubbins, & Popkin, 2000). Although rec-
ognizing the complexity of voting decisions, scholars have begun to real-
ize that these additional types of effects (e.g., learning, framing,
perceptions of issue salience) are themselves worthy criteria of effects, not
merely pathways to some ultimate political choice.
We distinguish four major classes of individual effects: opinion forma-
tion and change, cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral. We then turn from
individual effects to collective outcomes for the political system.

Opinion Formation and Change

A substantial body of literature concerns the media’s impact on the forma-
tion, change, and stabilization of opinions on political issues and candi-
dates. Opinion change is likely to be what comes to mind when thinking of
media effects. The early work of Lazarsfeld et al. (1948) failed to find per-
suasive media effects. The study of political opinion change was revital-
ized, however, by the application of the Elaboration Likelihood Model
(ELM) of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) and the Reasoned Action
Model (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) linking attitudes, perceived social norms,
and behavior. At least some success has been noted in their application to
campaign effects studies (Fazio & Williams, 1986; Granberg & Brown, 1989;
Krosnick, 1988; O’Keefe, 1985; O’Keefe, Rosenbaum, Lavrakas, Reid, &
Botta, 1996; Rice & Atkin, 2000). These models remain more applicable to
political advertising than to the less intentionally persuasive content of
news (Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1996). Zaller (1992) proposed, based on cog-
nitive principles, a general political attitude model called Receive-Accept-
Sample that has become widely used in many topic domains. Examples of
opinion change associated with media use are more frequently docu-
mented than are instances of its opposite, stabilization. However, debates
and other forms of campaign information have been shown to increase the
consistency of partisan attitudes (Katz & Feldman, 1962; Sears & Chaffee,
1979). In the context of political campaigns, it is increasingly recognized
that time matters, in terms of who is attending to what kind of information
and using it as the basis for decision making (Chaffee & Rimal, 1996).

Cognitive Effects

Here we summarize six types of cognitive effects that have received con-
siderable attention in recent years: agenda setting, priming, knowledge
gain, cognitive complexity, framing, and principled reasoning.