The Impact of Mass Media on Political Support

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of the mass media on citizens' political support. More precisely, the main interest of this work lays in the effects of the way in which mass media present political processes. Political processes in this study refer to dayto-day discussions of possible solutions to political problems and decision-making within the government, the parliament, or the political administration. The term "political support" is used in this study to refer to "an attitude by which a person orients himself to an object either favorably or unfavorably, positively or negatively" (cf. Easton, 1975, p. 436). Although political support might refer not only to evaluative attitudes but also to behavior (cf. Easton, 1975, p. 436), the interest of this study is limited to the aspect of political support as empirically observable evaluative attitudes of citizens. 1 Thus the study focuses on confidence or trust 2 in political institutions, political actors, and democracy. Trust is understood as the belief that the government or any other political institution is operating according to one's normative expectations of how they should function (A. H. Miller, 1974, p. 989) and individual interests of the citizen are attended to even without scrutiny (cf. Easton, 1975, p. 447;Gamson, 1968). Consequentially, political distrust is "a realistic critique of political performance and/or of fiduciary responsibility in the light of accepted democratic values" (Barber, 1983, p. 80f.).In order to investigate the impact of media presentations of political processes on political support, this study focuses on the example of Switzerland as a typical consensus democracy. As regards political decision-making strategies, bargaining is the dominant modus in consensus democracies (Czada, 2000;Lehmbruch, 2003;Lijphart, 1999). The endeavor to find collective compromises between diverging interests is the main purpose of bargaining procedures (Marcinkowski, 2005). Mass media, in contrast, tend to focus on discord instead of compromises and emphasize the behavior of single actors instead of collective actions (Grande, 2000;Marcinkowski, 2005). The distinct presentation of political processes by the mass media, hence, may challenge citizens' political support (Marcinkowski, 2000, p. 211; Sarcinelli, 1998, p. 553). 1This study's focus on evaluative attitudes is motivated by two factors. First, for economic reasons the scope of independent variables that are of interest in this study had to be restricted. Second, according to the value-attitude-behavior hierarchy, changes in behavior are a result of attitude changes (Bentler & Speckart, 1981;Homer & Kahle, 1988). In line with this, political participation was found to result from party identification and beliefs about government responsiveness (Abramson & Aldrich, 1982), for instance. 2In literature the terms confidence and trust are often used interchangeably.studies in the context of the presidential election campaigns (O' Keefe, 1980) and in the framework of an off-year election (Les...