Priming Personal Perceptions: News Media and the Salience of Personal and National Issue Perceptions in Political Evaluations.

Abstract

Researchers have long been concerned with whether and how individuals link personal interests or concerns to their political evaluations. Previous research shows that the media can influence both personal and national perceptions about political issues as well as the relative weight each has in national political evaluations (Mutz, 1998). However, the conditions under which this phenomenon occurs have not been well delineated. The goal of this dissertation is to examine the conditions under which the news media can link perceptions of personal and national concerns to evaluations of the president and national government by focusing on different types of content and differences among individuals. News priming (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987) is used as the explanation for how information should influence the weight given to personal or national perceptions in national political evaluations. Moreover, the study examines the dynamics of the priming effect by taking into account knowledge, partisanship, interest, and real-world cues as moderators. Methodologically, the study relies on a content analysis of newspaper and television news, and two national survey-based experiments.

Results from the content analysis indicate that newspapers and television news tend to portray politics as psychologically distant on a variety of dimensions, with the exception of temporal distance. The experiments show that proximal and distal news content had the ability to increase the weight of personal and national concerns in national political evaluations; however, it depended both on the characteristics of the issue at hand as well as differences among the individuals themselves. The experiments suggest that the capacity of the media to prime personal perceptions among the knowledgeable, interested, partisan, and experienced is different for novel issues compared to longstanding ones. Understanding these priming dynamics is important because political priming has both short and long-term consequences for public opinion.