Page 84 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 77

single-issue theory assumes that candidates will concentrate on one or a
small handful of topics, making every possible effort to put these topics in
the limelight of public and media debate. Analyzing American political ads
from the 1980s, one can observe that the latter theory dominated and
proved to be a more effective campaign strategy (Kern, 1989).
Each campaign attempted to produce priming effects by increasing the
salience of attitudes that favored its respective candidate, rather than pur-
sue the more difficult task of trying to talk voters out of their established
opinions. The process of priming, then, does not depend on altering an
individual’s political preferences (e.g., converting supporters of a particular
reform into opponents). Indeed, changing the public’s political preferences
is quite unlikely, especially during the short period of an election campaign.
Rather, “priming involves a twofold process: (1) it sets the agenda by focus-
ing public attention on certain topics, and (2) it provides the main basis for
evaluation” (Jacobs & Shapiro, 1994, p. 528). Moreover, a priming strategy
does not require candidates to advocate positions the candidate actually
opposes. Rather, it suggests that campaigns select a relatively few issues out
of a large pool of acceptable possibilities for particular emphasis.
Baumgartner and Jones (1993), in their theory of venue shopping, argued
that fundamental policy change often occurs when actors succeed in shift-
ing debates and decision making on a certain issue to new venues, which
are susceptible to different kinds of arguments than the venues that origi-
nally dealt with the issue. In other words, candidate strategy involves stra-
tegic adjustments: highlighting a few policies by increasing the frequency,
strength, and extensiveness of the candidate’s statements.
Druckman and Holmes (2004) examine the direct impact of presiden-
tial rhetoric on approval. They combined a content analysis of President
George W. Bush’s State of the Union address delivered on January 29,
2002, with both a laboratory experiment and a nationally representative
survey. In this address, Bush paid an inordinate amount of attention to the
issue of terrorism and homeland security in an attempt to redirect the
public away from its increasing focus on the economy. Druckman and
Holmes showed that the president can have a substantial and successful
effect on his own approval by priming the criteria on which citizens base
their approval evaluations. In general, the more a participant approved of
Bush’s performance on the war, terrorism, the economy, or education, the
greater the individual’s overall approval of Bush. Moreover, people who
did not watch the president’s address based their overall approval evalua-
tions on their issue-specific approval evaluations of the war in Afghanistan,
the economy, and education, but not terrorism. In contrast, the watchers
based their overall approval opinions on their issue-specific evaluations of