Page 126 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

118 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

the decisions of supporters and persuade and win the support of those
who are uncertain, those whose preferences are not crystallized, or those
who hesitate about or have poor identification with a candidate or party
that ideologically falls close to their beliefs.
Generally, the persuasion strategies used in political marketing rely on
two main methods of influencing citizens: priming (with agenda setting)
and framing. There are similarities and connections between agenda set-
ting, priming, and framing, but they are not identical approaches (see
Price & Tewksbury, 1997; Scheufele, 2000; Weaver, 2007). According to
agenda-setting theory (so-called first-level agenda setting), the media in-
fluence public opinion by emphasizing certain issues over others. The
amount of media attention, or the media salience, devoted to certain issues
increases their accessibility and consequently influences the degree of
public concern for these issues (McCombs, 2004). However, when the
media present an object, they also tell something about the attributes of
the object (so-called second-level agenda setting). According to McCombs
(2004, p.70), each of the objects on the agenda “has numerous attributes,
those characteristics and properties that fill out the picture of each object.
Just as objects vary in salience, so do the attributes of each object.” In other
words, the attributes of the object emphasized by the news media affect
the saliency of those attributes in the public mind.
According to Price and Tewksbury (1997):

Agenda setting looks on story selection as a determinant of public percep-
tions of issue importance and, indirectly through priming, evaluations of
political leaders. Framing focuses not on which topics or issues are selected
for coverage by the news media, but instead on the particular ways those
issues are presented. (p.184)

The primary difference between priming and framing is therefore the dif-
ference between whether we think about an issue and how we think about
it. Furthermore, Domke and his collaborators (1998) asserted that, by
highlighting some dimensions of issues while excluding other aspects, me-
dia framing of issue information seems likely to foster priming effects. In
effect, framing issues (e.g., abortion, euthanasia) in a manner that focuses
on their moral or ethical dimensions can prime some voters (e.g., evangeli-
cal Christians) to: (1) make attributions about candidate character, par-
ticularly integrity; and/or (2) evaluate other political issues (e.g., health
care) in ethical terms. The frame of a priming message, coupled with its
degree of resonance with an individual’s preexisting schema, determine
the extent to which a message primes subsequent judgments (Hwang,