Page 83 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

76 The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

However, priming may be understood not only as media effect but also
as a political campaign strategy—candidate priming. According to Negrine
(1994), the key elements of the political communication process include
media content, the influence of political institutions and other political
and social actors on the context of the messages, the specific audience and
interaction processes between sources of information, and the media dif-
fusing information. The content of media messages is the result of the
work of media practitioners (e.g., owners of media corporations, editors,
journalists, reporters) and political actors or events covered by the media.
Groups that influence the content of political communication have differ-
ent levels of power in this area. In their interactions with the media, politi-
cal actors—including parties, certain politicians, the government, and
others—try to achieve their own goals, and sometimes they manage to do
so by dominating the content of the message (Sheafer and Weimann,
2005).
However, if they fail, the “independent” communication of the media
may have a negative influence on the level of candidate support. This has
been seen, for example, with respect to economic recession and incum-
bents in American presidential elections (Shah, Watts, Domke, Fan, &
Fibison, 1999); the Iraq war and the 2005 British general election (Stevens
et al., 2011; Stevens & Karp, 2012); and public approval of the president’s
or government’s job, as in the Iran-Contra disclosure and evaluations of
President Ronald Reagan (Krosnick & Kinder, 1990), crime news and sup-
port for President Bill Clinton (Valentino, 1999), and the invasion of Iraq
and evaluations of President George W. Bush (McAllister, 2006).
Based on both quantitative and historical analysis of John F. Kennedy’s
1960 presidential campaign, Jacobs and Shapiro (1994) report that the
candidate’s policy positions were related to the results of his privately com-
missioned public opinion polls. Kennedy deliberately used these popular
issues to attract media attention and to shape the electorate’s standards for
evaluating his personal attributes.
Candidates intentionally engage in priming by emphasizing certain is-
sues (candidate agenda building)—by giving those issues more space in
their statements—with the goal of inducing voters to put more weight on
those issues when choosing among candidates (Druckman, Jacobs, &
Ostermeier, 2004). In relation to the definition of the scope of issues dis-
cussed during the campaign, two opposing theories are recognized: the
thousand-flower theory and the single-issue theory (Kern, 1989). The
former suggests that in their electoral strategy, candidates should express
their stance on all or the majority of issues that emerge in a given political
atmosphere and are broadly discussed in the media. By contrast, the