Presidential Campaigns and Presidential Accountability

5. Candidate Messages and Citizen Expectations

72 5 Candidate Messages and Citizen Expectations Presidential candidates offer clear and competing agendas in the campaign. Citizens, for the most part, pick up these agendas. If citizens select a candidate in part on the basis of that agenda, this is a version of issue voting, one based on priorities, not positions. Thus, the public need only vote for the candidate whose priorities best align with their own for the campaign to produce informed choice. One way this might occur is through priming, where a citizen who considers a problem —for example, climate change—a high government priority comes to weight that priority more heavily in evaluating the respective candidates . A candidate who shares her sense of urgency about the issue becomes increasingly likely to be viewed favorably by our environmentally concerned citizen. Priming, as a campaign effect, has received considerable attention. In fact, the idea of priming, or something very similar, dates back to classic voting studies from the 1940s. These early studies describe the campaign as “activating” particular issues, making them more salient in voter decision-making: “It is difficult to change people’s preferences; it is easier to affect the priorities and weights they give to subpreferences bearing on the central decision” (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954, 206). Despite this early recognition of priming, the idea languished in scholarly work on campaigns, though it flourished in studies of media effects. By now, it is commonly accepted that when the news emphasizes a consideration—unemployment, scandal, military action—that con- sideration becomes a more important predictor of presidential approval (Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Krosnick and Kinder 1990). Campaigns, too, can prime. But to understand how campaigns can create and reinforce enduring connections between candidates and issues, we must start by reconsidering the psychological underpinnings of priming . My argument relies on recognizing the critical distinction between two mechanisms of priming—that induced through recency and that induced through frequency—and noting that the effects of exposure to the campaign fit better with a frequency mechanism than a recency mechanism . Indeed, this distinction between recency- and frequency-induced priming is especially important because the political implications of the two are qualitatively different: Frequency priming helps build accountability whereas recency priming inhibits it. Priming Reconsidered Presidential candidates emphasize an agenda in hopes of encouraging citizens to make their vote choices on the basis of those issues and ideas that favor the candidate (Jacobs and Shapiro 1994; Johnston et al. 1992; Petrocik 1996). At least, that’s the consensus in most of the campaign effects research (Iyengar and Simon 2000; Kinder 1998). Iyengar and Kinder define this “priming effect” as “influence[ing] the standards by which governments, presidents, policies, and candidates for public office are judged” (1987, 63). Rather than evaluate political objects exhaustively, individuals rely on the information that is most accessible. Information is more accessible if individuals have been recently exposed to it, or if individuals have been frequently exposed to it and the information has become connected in memory to the political object being evaluated. Much of the work on priming emphasizes the recency argument; I focus on the role of frequent exposure. This difference in focus, from recency to frequency, follows from concern with the impact of campaign effects after the campaign, with agenda accountability. When political scientists talk about priming, or altering the dimensions of leader evaluation (Iyengar and Kinder 1987), they characterize the weight given to particular considerations in judgment as a function of accessibility, that is, how easily the consideration is retrieved from memory (Miller and Krosnick 2000). Accessibility of a consideration is increased through recent exposure (Iyengar et al. 1984; Mendelsohn 1996) or frequent exposure (Krosnick and Brannon 1993; Krosnick and Kinder 1990) to a message, or both (Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Price and Tewksbury 1997). Work on political priming seldom distinguishes between these Candidate Messages and Citizen Expectations 73 processes, yet these are different mechanisms produced by different environments and for which psychologists posit different outcomes. The social psychology literature concurs that priming is a function of accessibility. Yet social psychologists distinguish further between two types of accessibility—temporary and chronic—and add another inducer of priming to this list: applicability (Bargh et al. 1986; Higgins and Brendl 1995; Higgins 1996). These sources of priming have different antecedents —recency, frequency, and strength of associations, respectively. Acknowledging these different mechanisms of priming is key to reconciling contradictory conclusions about the duration, short...