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Mass Media and Third-Party Insurgency
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
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Mass Media and Third-Party Insurgency Richard Jenkins EL E C T I O N C A M PA I G N S A R E R A R E LY treated as decisive for election outcomes (Gelman and King 1993; Holbrook 1996; cf. Johnston et al. 1992). Instead, the information environment of campaigns is said to activate preexisting political predispositions within the electorate and thereby generate predictable outcomes. Although the “minimal effects” thesis has a strong hold on political science, this essay suggests that the focus on activation as the primary role of campaigns reBects a limited understanding of the potential power of campaigns. Information can change, and when it does, voters, especially those aware of the information change, can respond to the new information in meaningful ways. An analysis of the dramatic movement of Reform support during the 1993 election campaign in Canada reveals that campaigns can matter while providing an opportunity to unpack the relationship among voters, the media, and parties. The 1993 Canadian election witnessed the successful insurgency of the Reform Party in English Canada.1 While the emergence of Reform as the standard-bearer—at least temporarily—of the Canadian right could be partially explained ex post facto in terms of the conditions in place before the campaign, there is no way that such an outcome could have been predicted before the campaign began. Given that there were few voters who identiAed with the Reform Party or who knew much about Reform before the campaign began, Reform’s success could not be the product of a simple activation process. More likely is that the campaign provided voters with information that allowed them to learn and thereby link their underlying attitudes, especially their attitudes on the welfare state, to the parties. This 356 is consistent with the observation that “only as Reform’s anti-deAcit commitment became clear did the party break out of its ethno-religious base” (Johnston et al. 1996, 15). If the campaign had an effect on the outcome by providing voters with information, then we would expect to And dynamics in the nature and amount of information available about Reform (Converse 1962; Zaller and Hunt 1995). The analysis begins with a consideration of the relative amount of news attention Reform received using daily television news readings of the density of Reform coverage. It is clear that independent decisions on the part of the news media changed the accessibility of Reform’s key messages at different times during the campaign. The next step is to consider whether voters who were interviewed when Reform was highly visible in the news were more likely to support the party by merging the media data with the rolling cross-section wave of the 1992–93 Canadian Election Study (Brady and Johnston 1996). The more coverage that Reform receives, the more accurate the perceptions of Reform ’s spatial location on the deAcit issue should be and, therefore, the stronger the link between ideological predispositions and Reform vote intentions . While the information environment should induce temporal changes, Reform’s growth should be constrained by the structure of awareness and ideological predispositions in the electorate. Not everyone will be aware of the change in news coverage of Reform (Price and Zaller 1993; Zaller 1992), and not everyone will be ideologically predisposed to agree with Reform policies. This suggests that the relationship between coverage and individual opinion should be thought of in terms of a two-mediator (awareness and welfare state predisposition) model of media effects (McGuire 1969, 1986; Zaller 1992, 1996). The results conArm that the coverage-induced learning of Reform’s Ascally conservative position on the welfare state was limited to respondents who were predisposed to both get and accept pro-Reform messages. Although coverage had more marginal direct effects on Reform support, there is clear evidence that changing credibility affected the likelihood of voting Reform. Before turning to the empirical evidence to support these claims, the claim that the main function of campaigns is to activate predispositions is considered. While the activation claim cannot be rejected outright , the applicability of the model is questioned. In its place, a dynamic model of campaign effects is considered. Mass Media and Third-Party Insurgency 357 [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:29 GMT) Campaigns and the Media Our ability to predict election outcomes with remarkable accuracy months before the campaign begins, especially in the United States, implies a minimal role for the campaign in structuring electoral choices...