Page 86 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 79

advertising mentioned an issue, the less likely it was to be mentioned by
voters as a reason to dislike the president. The Clinton advertisements
were more successful at driving down his “negatives” than increasing vot-
ers’ reasons to favor him. Because of Clinton’s popularity during the gen-
eral election period, the president’s campaign would have been pleased to
simply limit his negatives among voters. Perot’s advertising appeared to
have little influence on how people evaluated the candidates.

Issue Priming

It is clear that campaigns can influence voters by altering their perceptions
of issue salience (e.g., Cwalina et al., 2011; Hillygus & Shields, 2008;
Holbrook, 1996; Newman, 1994). Druckman and colleagues (2004) sug-
gest three types of criteria that candidates use when they select an issue to
prime: when the issue is important for the public, when the public sup-
ports the candidate’s position on the issue, and when the public gives high
evaluations to the candidate’s handling of the issue.
First, an issue is advantageous for a candidate to prime when the public
ranks the issue as nationally important, when the issue is relatively novel
(e.g., the American Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, in an experi-
ment conducted by McGraw & Ling, 2003) or when it is easy to under-
stand (Kelleher & Wolak, 2006; Togeby, 2007).
Analyzing data from various American surveys conducted between
1958 and 2003, Hetherington and Rudolph (2008) found that people de-
cided how much they trust government by drawing upon the problems
they judged important at any given point in time—a process they define as
priming. Specifically, Americans trust the government more when they are
concerned about international problems, which suggests that persistently
high levels of concern about foreign threat at the height of the Cold War
produced what appear in retrospect to be anomalously high levels of po-
litical trust in the 1950s and 1960s. Priming also explains the dramatic
surge in trust after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when it
very briefly returned to 1960s-era levels. The continued importance of
international concerns in the three years that followed 9/11 is also consist-
ent with the fact that, despite much weaker economic performance and a
war that the public began to sour on, trust in government at the end of
2004 was higher than at the end of the Clinton presidency.
In their analyses of media influence on evaluations of German political
parties in 1986, Brosius and Kepplinger (1992) found that reporting on
political issues (e.g., the health care system, energy supply, public security,
national defense, economic situation) in TV newscasts not only caused