Issue news and electoral volatility

Kleinnijenhuis, J.; Ridder, J.A. de

doi:10.1111/1475-6765.00389

Cited by 30 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(22 reference statements)

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“…Thus, (a) when an issue received much attention in the media which a voter is exposed to, and (b) a voter considers a certain party to have the best solution for that issue, he or she will probably switch to that party. The results corroborate the assumptions of previous studies on an aggregate level (Kleinnijenhuis & De Ridder, 1998;Kleinnijenhuis et al, 2007) and suggest that issue ownership indeed underlies the effect of issue news on electoral volatility. The finding that issue news leads to vote switching challenges earlier findings by Takens (2013), who concluded that issue coverage stabilizes vote choice.…”

Section: The Impact Of Issues Party Visibility and Evaluations On Vsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Abstract Campaign News Content Analysis Media Effects Panmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The missing link between issue news and volatility is thus the party: the impact of issue news on vote switching is dependent upon the issue discussed, because different issues are perceived to be owned by different parties. These assumptions have been tested on the aggregate level, looking at vote choice (Kleinnijenhuis & De Ridder, 1998;Kleinnijenhuis, Van Hoof, Oegema, & De Ridder, 2007;Sheafer & Weimann, 2005), but not on the individual level focusing on vote switching.Contest or strategic news in itself also does not explain why voters might change their vote choice (as is assumed in Adriaansen et al, 2012;Takens, 2013). Again, for these types of news the missing link between news coverage on the one hand, and vote switching on the other, is the party.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Priming Issues, Party Visibility, and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Geers¹,

Bos

2016

Political Communication

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Voter volatility has become a hallmark of Western democracies in the past three decades. At the same time short-term factors-such as the media's coverage of issues, parties, and candidates during an election campaign-have become more important for voters' decisions. While previous research did look at how campaign news in general affects electoral volatility in general, it has omitted to explicitly test the mechanisms underlying these effects. Building on theories of agenda setting, (affective) priming, and issue ownership, the current study aims to explain why certain news aspects lead voters to switch their vote choice. We theorize it is the visibility of a party, the evaluation of a party, and the attention for issues owned by a party that primes voters to switch to a certain party. We use national panel survey data (N = 765) and link this to an extensive content analysis of campaign news on television and in newspapers in the run up to the 2012 Dutch national elections. The results show that issue news leads to vote change in the direction of the party that owns the issue. Even stronger is the effect of party visibility on vote switching. Our results, however, find the strongest support for the effect of party evaluations on vote change: More favorable news about a party increases switching to that party. Keywords campaign news, content analysis, media effects, panel data, voting behaviorIn the past three decades the number of floating voters in Western democracies has increased considerably. The linkages between parties and citizens are of declining importance (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000) and voters make more independent political choices instead of relying on traditional loyalties (Van der Meer, Van Elsas, Lubbe, & Van der Brug, 2013). As a consequence, citizens switch more often between parties than they did before, not only between elections, but also during election campaigns. With the decline in voter loyalty, sociological determinants have lost much of their predictive power (Dalton, 2013 Marks, 1999; Van der Meer et al., 2013) and results are scattered. Some report positive correlations between media use and volatility (Baker et al., 2006;Forrest & Marks, 1999), while others find a negative relationship (e.g., Bybee et al., 1981) and some find no effect (Dassonneville, 2011). Although these studies give insight into the effect of media use, the effect of media coverage is understudied.More recent studies have investigated whether different types of campaign coverage, most notably issue news and contest or strategic news, have an effect on individual-level vote switching (Adriaansen, Van Praag, & De Vreese, 2012;Takens, 2013). Adriaansen and colleagues (2012) found that issue news can induce voter uncertainty, whereas strategic news decreases voter uncertainty. This voter uncertainty would subsequently spark electoral volatility. In contrast, the study by Takens (2013) showed that voters become volatile in response to contest news, while issue news leads to stability in vote preferences. In this stud...

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Section: The Impact Of Issues Party Visibility and Evaluations On Vsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Abstract Campaign News Content Analysis Media Effects Panmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Priming Issues, Party Visibility, and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Geers¹,

Bos

2016

Political Communication

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“…The NIPO telepanel is a representative sample of the Dutch public and has been the basis for numerous academic studies (e.g., Kleinnijenhuis & De Ridder, 1998;Kleinnijenhuis & Fan, 1999). While the total sample size had 1,025 respondents in both waves, panel mortality resulted in 817 respondents actually participating in both waves; all analyses below are based on these 817 respondents.…”

Section: Survey Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Media Priming in a Multi-Party Context: A Controlled Naturalistic Study in Political Communication

2006

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This study investigates media priming effects in the context of a Summit meeting of European Union (EU) leaders. It differs in four ways from most previous non-experimental priming studies: (1) it provides survey data accompanied by a content analysis of the news, (2) it compares priming effects on evaluations of a number of political leaders, who differed in their visibility in the news, (3) it involves an issue with low salience, and (4) it studies priming effects in the context of a European Parliamentary democracy. The study involves a two-wave panel study (before and after the Summit) on a representative sample of 817 Dutch adults, and a content analysis of the newspaper and television news in the 8 weeks leading up to the Summit meeting. The study shows that media priming effects occur only for the politicians who appeared visible in the news in connection with the issue. The media priming effects were not significantly moderated by political attentiveness or by political knowledge. We also explore the aggregate level consequences of priming for the popularity of leaders, and demonstrate that, as a result of media priming, two politicians became more popular, despite having received a bad press.

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“…La cuestión de la corrupción era una cuestión propia de la oposición: cuanto mas a menudo aparecía en los medios, aunque fuera vinculada a la actuación del gobierno socialista en su persecución, más reforzaba la metapreferencia por el cambio de gobierno, y por tanto la estrategia de la oposición (Kleinnijenhuis y De Ridder, 1998). Es difícil imaginar qué estrategia, discursiva, política o económica, podría haber evitado que los socialistas llegaran como perdedores a las elecciones de 1996, incluso si la recuperación de la economía hubiera sido percibida por los electores.…”

Section: Clase Preferencias Y Cuestionesunclassified

Clase y voto: intereses, identidades y preferencias

Paramio¹

2000

Reis

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Se discute en primer lugar el uso ambiguo y contradictorio del concepto de divisoria social (cleavage) para analizar la relación entre clase y voto, y se propone después estudiar esta relación en un marco en el que los intereses económicos, definidos por la estructura social, son sólo un punto de partida. Las identidades sociales y políticas de los electores, en este esquema, juegan un papel decisivo para determinar las preferencias de los electores, lo que implica que las explicaciones económicas del voto subestiman los factores propiamente políticos. As IntroducciónEn los estudios sobre clase y voto se suele partir de la clase como una de las líneas divisorias fundamentales (cleavages) de nuestras sociedades, y siguiendo una perspectiva clásica se presupone que debe explicar en gran medida el comportamiento electoral. O, por el contrario, se intenta mostrar que no es así, y que dicha perspectiva clásica ya no es válida. Se puede argumentar que este planteamiento inicial es profundamente equívoco, dado el uso polisémico que damos al término cleavage. Una posibilidad más sensata sería entonces tratar de ver en qué medida la estructura de clase condiciona los intereses de los electores.Pero la idea de que los intereses determinan las preferencias de los electores implica que éstas son unidimensionales, lo que encaja mal con la perspectiva más reciente sobre los valores en las sociedades desarrolladas. Independientemente de que se acepten o no los planteamientos de Inglehart sobre el ascenso de nuevos valores posmaterialistas, existe una amplia evidencia de que los electores interpretan la misma evolución de la economía en función de parámetros que no se reducen a los propios intereses materiales, sino que incluyen criterios políticos y sociales. Por otra parte, en el análisis de los resultados de las campañas surgen razones para pensar que los electores deciden sobre cuestiones concretas, a partir de su valoración previa respecto a ellas.La perspectiva que cabe adoptar es dual: aceptar que la clase determina los intereses materiales y estudiar después cómo las identidades sociales y políticas crean el marco de interpretación de tales intereses y las metapreferencias a partir de las cuales algunas cuestiones se convierten en cruciales a la hora de decidir el sentido del voto. En este marco se pueden analizar los efectos de los discursos y estrategias partidarias sobre la autoidentificación de unos electores cuya posición de clase les condiciona en términos de

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Issue news and electoral volatility

Cited by 30 publications

References 16 publications

Priming Issues, Party Visibility, and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Priming Issues, Party Visibility, and Party Evaluations: The Impact on Vote Switching

Media Priming in a Multi-Party Context: A Controlled Naturalistic Study in Political Communication

Clase y voto: intereses, identidades y preferencias

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