Page 247 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

236 McLEOD, KOSICKI, McLEOD

Political Participation

Media effects on voting preferences have long dominated the political
communication agenda. Voting decisions remain the ultimate criterion in
much of the research reviewed here; however, recent work no longer
looks for direct media effects and instead sees voting as a complex behav-
ior influenced indirectly through the various cognitive influences.
Another change is that interpersonal communication has become part of
the participation process rather than simply an antecedent of voting.

Voter Turnout. Turnout was once thought to be a rather uninteresting
phenomenon simply explained and highly stable, but it seems less pre-
dictable and more interesting in recent years. Turnout continues to be pre-
dicted by education, partisanship, age, church attendance, community
involvement, and marital status (Strate, Parrish, Elder, & Ford, 1989;
Wolfinger & Rosenstone, 1980), but abstention from voting remains on the
rise, and television is thought to contribute to the decline of participation
(Ranney, 1983). In a panel study of the unusually high abstention rate in
the 1970 British general election, media influences were found to be com-
plex (Blumler & McLeod, 1974). Those mostly likely to abstain as a result
of disenchantment with the televised image of the person’s party leader,
surprisingly, tended to be the more-educated and better-informed voters.
Turnout studies in the United States suggest that exposure and attention
to hard news in the print media are associated with turnout and with
other forms of participation as well (McLeod, Bybee, Luetscher, & Garra-
mone, 1981; McLeod & McDonald, 1985). Teixeira (1992) goes well
beyond structural factors such as poverty and mobility to examine a
range of motivational variables that are shown to affect turnout positively
and negatively and suggests a number of campaign and media reforms
designed to increase turnout.

Interpersonal Communication. The Columbia studies posed inter-
personal communication as an alternative to mass media influence, not-
ing that on an average day, 10% more discussed the election than read or
heard about it through the media (Lazarsfeld et al., 1948). Other observers
have come to see this as a “synthetic competition” (Chaffee, 1982), argu-
ing that media and interpersonal channels may have convergent, comple-
mentary, or other relationships as well. There is substantial evidence that
both customary patterns of exposure and attention to newspaper public
affairs content and exposure to the media during the campaign stimulate
interpersonal discussion (McLeod et al., 1979). Although not very efficient
in conveying information about issues, the media do seem to stimulate
interpersonal discussion and interest in the campaign (McLeod et al.,