Abstract
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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Notes
Because of the high volume of political news in the press, a decision was taken to focus on all front page news plus those news stories inside the newspapers that dealt with one or more of the following issues: Europe or European integration, drugs policy, crime, and immigration. Because of the large number of newspaper stories that continued to meet these criteria, the decision was taken to code newspapers every other day.
A news item may, of course, deal with the European Union, as well as with other issues, such as crime. In 18.7% of the total number of news items selected in this 8-week-period (see note 1), Europe or European integration was one of the topics. Other topics in the news included crime, social welfare/education, economy, infrastructure/ environment/ agriculture, foreign news, politics in general, and non-political news. Although there was variation across newspapers and television news programs, only one outlet that had a small audience came in well below the above reported averages and that was a new television news program that resembled US local news in its emphasis on crime and non-political news.
The telepanel consists of a sample of households that is representative of the Dutch population. Different members of the households are required to answer a questionnaire each week electronically, and the data from different waves can be linked at an individual level. Since different members of each household can fill in the questionnaire there is always only a partial overlap between the different waves. As a consequence “only” 817 respondents participated in both waves, even though 1,025 persons were interviewed in each separate wave. We decided to estimate our model on the selection of respondents who participated in both waves, so that our results were not affected by differences in the composition of the samples. The analyses were also done for the full sample of 1,025, with the same substantive results.
We used a program called Amelia, which is programmed by Honaker, Joseph, King, Sceve, and Singh (2001), and which is available through Gary King’s website: http://Gking.Harvard.edu/. All analyses were performed five times on five datasets in which the missing data were imputed under different assumptions. The reported parameter estimates are the averages of the five estimated values. The standard errors are then computed using a different formula, which is based on the estimated standard errors, as well as the variance in the estimated parameters (for details, see King et al., 2001).
In another round of analyses, religion and left–right self-placement were also included as predictors of evaluations of politicians. These variables rarely exerted significant effects, and by adding them, the substantive results remain the same. Therefore the fuller model is not presented here.
In an earlier stage of this study we have linked the information about media content to the individual level survey data, on the basis of respondent’s media use. This did not yield any significant effects, which is not surprising in view of results presented by Zaller (2002). He simulated a change of 5% of the votes for an imaginary candidate in an election, which is only attributable to an effect of media use, and shows that these effects will only turn out to be significant (at p < 0.05 in a one-tailed test) in 18% of the samples of 500 respondents and in about 21% of the samples where N = 1,000. In our study, we have a sample of similar magnitude, and the effects are not expected to be as large as those simulated by Zaller. Moreover, as Table 1 showed, the contents of the different outlets were quite similar, at least in the way they framed news about Europe. If different media report similarly on an issue, it is unlikely that the priming effects will be different when linked to individual media use.
The predicted scores on the sympathy scale were computed in two steps. In step 1 the regression equation at t (post-Summit wave) was estimated for each politician. The parameter estimates of these regressions (as presented in Tables 3, 4) were used to estimate the predicted scores at t-1 (before the Summit), with the following equation: \( \hat y_{t - 1} = a_t + b1_t \times X1_{t - 1} + b2_t \times X2_{t - 1} + b3_t \times X3_{t - 1} . \) This yields a predicted value of the sympathy rating of each individual respondent (one for each politician). Table 7 presents the means of these predicted values.
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Appendix
Appendix
This appendix gives an overview of the results of Mokken scaling analyses, for the four scales measured with multiple items: attitudes toward immigrant, attitudes toward the EU, political knowledge and political attentiveness. In addition to Mokken scaling, we present the reliability of these scales (Cronbach’s Alpha).
Mokken (1971) developed a stochastic variant of the deterministic Guttmann scale, based on item-response theory. This method is preferred over better known scaling methods, such as principle components analyses, because it has been demonstrated those methods often yield deceptive and invalid results when applied to ordinal data (Coombs, 1964; Van Schuur, 2003). Jacoby (1991) gives a good introduction to item response theory and to the Mokken model. The most important criterion to evaluate whether items form a unidimensional cumulative scale, is the coefficient of homogeneity (the “H-coefficient”). According to Mokken (1971) the minimum value for the H-coefficient for items to is 0.30. Values higher than 0.50 indicate a strong scale (see also Van Schuur, 2003).
The items of the scales for attitudes toward the EU and attitudes toward immigrants are statements and respondents are asked to indicate with likert scales to which extent they agree with them. Since some items were phrased positively toward immigrants and toward the EU, and others negatively, we reversed the scales of some of the items. The knowledge items were coded as dummies (1 = correct answer, 0 = wrong or no answer). The attentiveness items have three or four categories, and Mokken scaling is able to handle scales where items have different numbers of categories. After the scales were created we scaled all variables from a minimum value of 0 to a maximum value of 1. Table A1 presents the results of the scaling analyses, as well as the mean scores of all items (when expressed on a 0–1 scale).
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van der Brug, W., Semetko, H.A. & Valkenburg, P.M. Media Priming in a Multi-Party Context: A Controlled Naturalistic Study in Political Communication. Polit Behav 29, 115–141 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-006-9020-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-006-9020-7