Marion R. Just

The focus group method, political advertising, campaign news, and the construction of candidate images

This study demonstrates how the focus group method may be linked to simulation to produce a new tool for analyzing campaign discourse. It provides evidence about the origin, development, and dynamic revision of candidate schemas over time and shows how political information is interpreted and utilized. Stimulus materials are drawn from the 1990 Jesse Helms‐Harvey Gantt Senate race. Results show that advertising messages are far more likely than campaign news to stimulate discourse, and that negative ads can be highly effective against the target even as the author is penalized for dirty campaigning. Analysis of the discourse illustrates the impact of televised political messages that resonate with an individuals deeply held values and affects, such as attitudes toward race and homophobia.

Leadership Image-Building: After Clinton and Watergate

Leadership images are built collectively by leaders and their relevantconstituencies—elected officials, the news media, and the public. The process of buildingleadership image rests on prior expectations about the leader, policy outputs, the course ofevents, and the disposition of political resources. In building images of leadership, each of thethree constituencies puts more weight on some aspects of image-building than on others: Thepublic sees the president primarily in terms of his previous behavior, the media view thepresident through the lens of immediate events, and other elected officials focus on politicalresources. One of the presidents most important resources is his public image. It can helphim to maintain the loyalty of other officials, which in turn contributes to balanced newscoverage, even in times of crisis. President Clinton was able to preserve his public image throughthe impeachment debacle in large part because of low public expectations about his personalmoral behavior and satisfaction with his economic leadership. Conversely, President Nixon wasforced to resign because of high public expectations about his personal probity anddisappointment with his management of the economy.

The 2008 Media Primary Handicapping the Candidates in Newspapers, on TV, Cable, and the Internet

The press plays a crucial role early in the preprimary presidential campaign, determining which candidates appear viable to voters, contributors, and other media. This process necessarily benefits some candidates over others. We analyze how the press winnowed the candidate fields of both parties in the early 2008 preprimary campaign. We find coverage remarkably similar across a wide range of traditional and new media, including newspaper, radio, television, cable, legacy and web-native Internet news, and talk shows. The media ignored most candidates to concentrate on the Democratic contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama while paying less attention to the Republican race. Tone towards candidates was uniform except on partisan talk shows. The tone of Internet news was slightly more balanced than traditional outlets. Similar coverage across media results from journalistic preference for dramatic story lines, staffing constraints, and widespread speculation about candidate viability, which we describe as “handicapping the candidates.”

Learning from the news: Experiments in media, modality, and reporting about star wars

Abstract This study explores what ordinary American adults learn from news reported in different communications modalities and media. In the first experiment, the text of news items about Star Wars is held constant but the communications modality varies. In the second experiment, news reports reflect the journalistic style of television, newspaper, and magazine reporting. In the modality experiment, subjects learned equally well from the audiovisual, audio, or print versions of the stories. In the media experiment, subjects in the magazine and television conditions gained substantially more information than those in the newspaper condition; but when subjects were asked to apply information to policy judgments about Star Wars, magazine readers were more dovish than television viewers. For Star Wars news, it appears that the content and characteristic style of a news medium have important effects on news comprehension, particularly for the least informed and least interested members of the public.

CAUSAL MODELS OF VOTER RATIONALITY, GREAT BRITAIN 1959 AND 1963

STUDENTS of voting behaviour are engaged in a free-will vs. determinism controversy. The question is, does a voter choose the candidates or party which best represents his interests or does a voter merely respond automatically to given:socio-economic circumstances and environmental factors ? Many voting studies have attempted to predict preferences by relying primarily on socio-economic variables.’ Analytic refinements, including voters’ attitudinal structure and reference groups cues, have only blunted the edge of deterministic models.’ V. 0. Key, Jr., was one of the first researchers to restore the rational voter to his model of electoral decisionmaking.3 The hypothesis of this study is that a model of voting must include rational choice as well as socio-economic factors. This hypothesis was applied to voting preferences in Great Britain, during the period 195966. Britain is marked by a predominantly two-party system, ethnic, geographic and religious homogeneity, and high urbanization. The most significant remaining cleavage in the British electorate is class.* If rational voting is a factor in the British model, we may assume that rationality has even more latitude in other systems with crosscutting cleavages. Charting the voting decision will help to tell us if a rational vote is possible. The links in the causal chain may provide the clue to the distribution of rational voting. Rationality is a difficult concept to operationalize. Political ‘rationality’ is not a surrogate for ‘ideology’ nor vice versa. Rationality, implies some ability to test reality, for which mental health and minimum intelligence are necessary. Political rationality implies socialization into the political process, some education in the values, rules, and idioms of politics. Instrumental political choices are those which result in a preponderance of good over bad outcomes when that is possible to predict. Given the uncertainty of political life and the imperfect information available to all political participants, instrumentality must be construed broadly. A multivariate tabular analysis of survey data from Great Britain in 1959 and 1963, tended to confirm results of other voting studies.’ The impact of family of origin, present class, information about politics, policy attitudes, and party ties showed strong relationships with voting preferences. The relationship between strength of partisanship and interest in politics, in particular, was investigated. Anthony Downs maintains in his economic model of voting that ‘(1) information is relatively useless to those citizens who care which party wins and (2) those citizens for