The article, “Altering the Foundations of Support for the President through Priming” (Krosnick, J.; Kinder, D., 1990) uses the theory of priming to show that when the media pays more attention to a particular issue or portrays it in a certain way, citizens tend to incorporate what they know about that issue into their overall judgment of the president.
The study is useful because it uses a major event which captured national attention in 1986—the Iran-Contras issue—and combines it with reliable data from the 1986 National Election Study.
However, I think some questions need to be answered before the conclusions of this study are applied broadly to the American public. The study selected 1,086 people from the original sample of 2,176 people because they had answered a rich variety of questions pertaining to the focus of the study. However, the authors don’t mention if that sample mirrors the U.S. population demographically. The equation used to measure public opinion controls for age, sex, race, education, etc. therefore, the results are valid, but without indication that the original sample reflects the U.S. population, generalization of the results is difficult.
Also, when the authors divided this group into those interviewed before the November 25 revelations and those interviewed after, the size of the first group (N=714) was more than double the size of the second group (N=349), which, in my opinion, makes comparison difficult. Table 1, which shows the opinion of people about President Reagan and opinions on foreign affairs before and after the Contras issue, lists the figures in percentages. Due to the different strength of the two groups, these figures might not reflect the truth.
Referencing Table 1, the authors say that public opinion about foreign affairs vis a vis the Contras issue remained unchanged. I think this is true only for two of the four questions. The question regarding U.S. involvement in Central America registered a perceptible change (nearly 4% fewer people said the U.S. should be less involved post-revelation) as did the question about aid to Contras in Nicaragua (4% people in the post-revelation questionnaire said aid should be increased).
Also, the authors make a suggestion that the reason why more people claimed that the U.S’s role as a superpower was in decline was because of the perception that the administration had taken an arms-for-hostage deal with Iran, not because of the Contras issue. This assertion sounds like a hypothesis without foundation or proof.
The authors, while investigating whether political novices were more perceptible to priming than political experts, assess political expertise by asking respondents to identify six political figures. This is a very simplistic scale because political knowledge cannot be measured by a simple face and name recognition question. People who are unable to remember a name or recognize a political person might be well-versed in a political issue that’s more relevant to them, and it’s unfair to classify them as political novices. Similarly, recognizing a political figure or name does not make a person a political expert.
Moreover, the authors fail to test the relationship between amount of news coverage and degree of priming. They report in their discussion that increased news coverage of a particular issue serves to focus public attention on that topic, but if they had found a way to measure exposure, it would have made for a more convincing case.
Interestingly, another study (Malhotra, N. & Krosnick, J., 2007) challenges the conclusion of Krosnick and Kinder’s study, that the media’s coverage of issues can influence political novices. Malhotra and Kosnick used national survey data collected between February and September of 2004 and found no support for their hypothesis that changes in the amount of media coverage of an issue during the course of a campaign precipitates changes in the weight citizens place on an issue when evaluating the president’s overall job performance, particularly among those exposed most to the news. The authors concluded that the conditions under which priming occurs should be specified very precisely.
References:
Krosnick, J., & Kinder, D. (1990) Altering the Foundations of Support for the President Through Priming. The American Political Science Review. 84(2). pp. 497-512.
Malhotra, N., & Krosnick, J. (2007). Retrospective and Prospective Performance Assessments during the 2004 Election Campaign: Tests of Mediation and News Media Priming. Political Behavior, 29(2), 249-278. doi:10.1007/s11109-007-9027-8.
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