Page 94 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 87

candidates’ personal qualities are highlighted by the media and parties are
ignored, voters who are more highly exposed to the media become in-
creasingly likely to base their votes on candidate evaluations.
The research conducted by Druckman (2004) concerning media issue
and image priming was based on the 2000 campaign for the U.S. Senate in
Minnesota. The content analysis of local newspapers allowed Druckman
to define the major subjects of the campaign, which focused on Social
Security and health care issues and the integrity of the candidates.
Druckman also used data from the Election Day exit poll for his analysis
and looked at differences between voters who paid attention to and dis-
cussed the campaign (“campaign voters”) and those who did not (“non-
campaign voters”). The results of these analyses showed that the
noncampaign voters did not rely on the issues of Social Security and integ-
rity; rather, they based their votes on taxes and leadership effectiveness—
an issue and an image that were not particularly emphasized in the
campaign. In contrast, campaign voters focused mainly on the central is-
sue and image in the campaign. Thus, campaign priming effects mani-
fested themselves only among voters who paid attention to and discussed
the campaign.
Second, candidates can employ an indirect priming strategy by invok-
ing visual cues that enhance the persuasive power of their images. National
symbols are central to any nation-state. They provide an outward repre-
sentation for a collective, its history, and its achievements. National sym-
bols acquire their symbolic meaning through various means, including
their metaphorical qualities and the ways in which they are embedded in
various cultural practices (e.g., education). The theory of symbolic politics
holds that people acquire stable, affective responses to particular symbols
through a process of classical conditioning, which manifests itself most
intensely relatively early in life (Sears, 1993). The political symbol is any
affectively charged element in a political attitude object, such as a national
flag or anthem, a political party logo, or the Nazi swastika. These learned
dispositions may or may not persist throughout adult life, but the strong-
est—the so-called symbolic predispositions, such as party identification,
political ideology, and racial prejudice—do. Any given attitude object
(e.g., a particular presidential candidate) is composed of one or more sym-
bolic elements, and each conveys some meaning to the individual.
Attitudes toward the object as a whole reflect some combination of the
affects previously conditioned by the specific symbols included in it.
When the symbols become salient later on, they evoke consistent evalua-
tions through a process of transfer of affect. As a result, the symbolic poli-
tics process is characterized by generally automatic, unthinking, reflexive,