Page 96 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Persuasion in the Political Context 89

candidate character traits. The more certain a voter is about a candidate’s
policy positions, the more the voter uses those positions to inform percep-
tions of the candidate’s personality. This relationship, in turn, produces
sizable differences in whom the voter is likely to support.

Limits of Priming
As Miller and Krosnick (2000, p. 302) claimed, “According to the theory
of media priming, people are victims of the architecture of their minds—if
a political issue is activated in people’s memories by media attention to it,
they presumably use the concept when asked to make political judg-
ments—not by conscious choice, but merely because information about
the issue appears automatically and effortlessly in consciousness.”
However, they emphasized that this radical view on media priming is too
narrow and simplistic.
First, priming is mediated by the specific features of any issue, the par-
ticular values emphasized in media coverage, and individuals’ cognitive
systems, thus fostering “different priming effects from different issues for
different people” (Domke et al., 1998, p. 52). For example, Ha (2011)
combined public opinion data from the National Election Studies on can-
didate selection criteria in the 1992 and 2000 presidential elections with
content analyses of campaign news coverage and found out that media
exposure, in general, had a positive impact on voters’ susceptibility to
news agendas, but the strength of its impact was significantly moderated
by the voters’ levels of political sophistication. The moderately sophisti-
cated are more likely to accept media agendas as their criteria for candi-
date selection than the poorly or highly sophisticated. The least
sophisticated seem to be less susceptible to campaign news mostly because
of their inattention to news media, which can be attributed to their lower
interest in politics, whereas the most sophisticated are so because they
usually are better able to counter-argue against the information in the
news. However, the moderately sophisticated have enough political inter-
est to seek information about political campaigns but do not have a well-
developed defense mechanism to refute media agendas; thus, they are
more open to media influence. Moreover, the high-sophistication group is
relatively less susceptible to campaign news despite its greater level of
news exposure, whereas the low-sophistication group becomes more sus-
ceptible as its exposure level increases. This finding means that priming
effects are not owing to a single factor of media exposure, but rather that
they are a combination of both exposure and information-processing abil-
ity (on the moderating role of political knowledge, see also Krosnick &