Page 92 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 85

altering the valence and volume of candidate coverage. Moreover, incum-
bents presiding over periods of prosperity garner significantly more eco-
nomic coverage as well as more favorable economic coverage than their
opponents. In contrast, incumbents overseeing recessionary periods ap-
pear to receive substantially more negative economic coverage than chal-
lengers, as occurred in 1992. In combination, this suggests that information
about the challenger is relatively unpersuasive to the public when the in-
cumbent is well regarded.
Using national survey data collected between February and September
of 2004, Malhotra and Krosnick (2007) inquired whether public approval
of President George W. Bush’s handling of a series of specific national prob-
lems (e.g., the Iraq war) influenced overall assessments of his job perform-
ance and evaluations of his likely future performance versus John Kerry’s,
and whether that, in turn, shaped voting choices. They observed that per-
ceptions of President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, the economy, and
terrorism all had impact on voting choices, but they were partly mediated
by overall assessments of his job performance and by guesses about how
well he and Senator Kerry would handle these issues in the future. These
domain-specific prospective assessments were derived partly from percep-
tions of the president’s handling of these domains in the past and partly by
perceptions of his overall performance. Nevertheless, the situation in Iraq
seemed to carry the most weight in driving overall performance evalua-
tions and voting choices, whereas the other two domains had less
impact.

Image Priming

Van der Brug, Semetko, and Valkenburg (2007), in their two-wave panel
study on media priming effects in the context of a summit meeting of
European Union leaders, observed that media priming effects occurred in
connection with improved evaluations only for politicians who appeared
visible in the news in connection with the European Union, especially
Dutch prime minister Wim Kok and French president Jacques Chirac. In
contrast, media priming effects did not occur for four political leaders who
were not visible in the news in connection with Europe (U.S. president Bill
Clinton and the leaders of three Dutch political parties: Frits Bolkestein of
the Liberal Party, Paul Rosenmöller of the Greens, and Jaap de Hoop
Scheffer of the Christian Democrats).
Analyzing the data from the 1988, 1993, and 1997 Canadian Election
Studies, Gidengil, Blais, Nevitte, and Nadeau (2002) established that an
election campaign generally primed the personal characteristics of party