Super Tuesday and the "primary" education of the electorate: Political learning and the news media.

Abstract

This thesis details how individuals learn about candidates during a presidential nominating campaign. An "indirect effects and individual-level conditions" model of political learning is developed to explain changes in how much individuals learn about candidates during the campaign. According to this model, how much a person learns about a candidate depends on the amount of information made available about the candidate in the news. The impact of this news coverage is hypothesized not to be direct but rather to be conditioned by the predispositions to learn about politics that individuals bring with them into the campaign. The research design developed to test this model relies on two complementary data sets, both of which were gathered during the 1988 Democratic and Republican presidential nomination campaigns. One set consists of original data detailing the amount of news coverage provided about the candidates in the sixteen states which held presidential primaries on March 8, 1988, "Super Tuesday." A second consists of American National Election Studies data drawn from a representative sample of citizens living in these same sixteen states; these data made it possible to assess how the nature of candidate awareness in the Super Tuesday electorate changed during the course of the campaign. In order to test the model, the content data on variations in the nature of candidate news coverage across campaign active states were merged with the survey data on citizens' knowledge of candidates and their individual-level predispositions to learn. The findings demonstrate that news coverage matters but that the ultimate power of news coverage on knowledge about the candidates depends on three important considerations: (1) the amount of news coverage devoted to a candidate during the campaign; (2) the predispositions to learn that citizens bring with them into the campaign, including their news use habits, political involvement, political interest, cognitive capabilities, partisan motivations, and news use habits; and (3) levels of public awareness of the candidates at the start of the campaign.