New Perspectives and Evidence on Political Communication and Campaign Effects

Iyengar, Shanto; Simon, Adam F.

doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.51.1.149

Cited by 308 publications

(207 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…The paper begins with the theoretical observation that, in politics as in the rest of life, citizens 1 For reviews, see Iyengar and Simon, 2000; Kinder 2003. 3 form opinions by one of two routes (Hastie and Park, 1986).…”

Section: Scholars Do Not Usually Test For the Duration Of The Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication

Hill¹,

Lo²,

Vavreck³

et al. 2013

Political Communication

188

109

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Scholars do not usually test for the duration of the effects of mass communication, but when they do, they typically find rapid decay. Persuasive impact may end almost as soon as communication ends. Why so much decay? Does mass communication produce any long-term effects? How should this decay color our understanding of the effects of mass communication? We examine these questions with data from the effects of advertising in the 2000 presidential election and 2006 sub-national elections, but argue that our model and results are broadly applicable within the field of political communication. We find that the bulk of the persuasive impact of advertising decays quickly, but that some effect in the presidential campaign endures for at least six weeks. These results, which are similar in rolling cross-section survey data and county-level data on actual presidential vote, appear to reflect a mix of memory-based processing (whose effects last only as long as short-term memory lasts) and on-line processing (whose effects are more durable). Finally, we find that immediate effects of advertising are larger in sub-national than presidential elections, but decay more quickly and more completely.2 Joseph Klapper's classic argument that exposure to mass communication rarely causes significant opinion change is no longer persuasive to many scholars (Klapper, 1960). In the laboratory and in the field, multiple studies have demonstrated fairly large and seemingly consequential effects of exposure to mass communication. 1 A handful of recent studies, however, has found that persuasion effects can be quite shortlived, decaying in a few weeks or even a few days. Best known is the Texas advertising study, which found no persistence of persuasion effects in the week following exposure to the ads (Gerber, Gimpel, Green, and Shaw, 2011). But other recent studies show similar results. For example, Mutz and Reeves (2005) found that exposure to "uncivil behavior" on TV talk shows reduced the public's level of political trust, but that trust bounced back to baseline levels in a follow-up survey.Social psychologists have grappled for decades with findings that persuasive communication often produces only short-lived effects (Cook and Flay, 1978;Petty and Wegener, 1998 raised, much less investigated, are the focus of this paper. We answer them with evidence on the effects of political advertising, but our analysis is framed in terms generally applicable within the field of mass political communication.The paper begins with the theoretical observation that, in politics as in the rest of life, citizens 1 For reviews, see Iyengar and Simon, 2000; Kinder 2003. 3 form opinions by one of two routes (Hastie and Park, 1986). In the first, memory-based evaluation, people express opinions on the basis of information available in memory when asked. In this model, the effect of persuasive messages is to create opinions that may persist only as long as the messages underlying them remain accessible in memory, which may not be long. In the...

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Section: Scholars Do Not Usually Test For the Duration Of The Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication

Hill¹,

Lo²,

Vavreck³

et al. 2013

Political Communication

188

109

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We adopt as our theoretical framework the so-called dosage-resistance (Krosnick & Brannon 1993) or ''resonance'' (Iyengar & Simon 2000) model of persuasion. Such models understand the impact of a political message in terms of both how many messages one is exposed to and one's ability to reject or accept such messages.…”

Section: Theory and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Political Advertising Persuade?

Michael

Ridout

2007

Polit Behav

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Well over $1 billion was spent on televised political advertising in the U.S. in 2004. Given the ubiquity of the 30 second spot, one might presume that ads must affect viewers' vote choices. Somewhat surprisingly, though, scholars have yet to make much progress in confirming this claim. In this paper, we leverage a comprehensive dataset that tracks political ads in the nation's top media markets and a survey of presidential and U.S. Senate voters in 2004. We ask whether exposure to presidential and Senate advertising influences voters' evaluations of candidates and the choices that they make at the ballot box. In the end, we find considerable evidence that advertising persuades-and that its impact varies depending on the characteristics of the viewer.

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“…As will be noted later, during this time period there was less attention given to the other variables that played a role in the process of news creation and more emphasis was placed on the influence of coverage and change from the voter's perspective-how did the voters' information and subsequent preferences change over time as the campaign progressed. Survey data dominated and was most available, and it is likely that much of the self-reported exposure to media in these early studies contained significant measurement error (Iyengar and Simon 2000). There was a substantial growth in our knowledge of how the presidential nomination process worked and what structural and strategic factors affected the behaviors of candidates and voters.…”

Section: Media In the Post Reform Nomination Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Media and Presidential Nomination Campaigns: When Bad News Becomes Good News (or at least a little better)

Haynes¹

2008

ARP

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This paper examines the research in media and presidential nomination campaigns as it has emerged during the post-reform era and moved into the new millennia. While there has been ample progress in the field, most notable has been the change in tone in the research from “bad” news to “good” news. Interpretations from the most recent research in the area suggest that the news media do not perform as poorly as judged in the earlier decades, at least in terms of providing information to voters. Moreover, voters are now portrayed not as naïve citizens who are easily manipulated by the media, but rather more resilient to media manipulation, and active consumers of information for political learning purposes.

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New Perspectives and Evidence on Political Communication and Campaign Effects

Cited by 308 publications

References 46 publications

How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication

How Quickly We Forget: The Duration of Persuasion Effects From Mass Communication

Does Political Advertising Persuade?

Media and Presidential Nomination Campaigns: When Bad News Becomes Good News (or at least a little better)

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