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Issue Priming Revisited: Susceptible Voters and Detectable Effects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2017

J. Scott Matthews
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Abstract

It is widely claimed that campaign communications direct voter attention to the considerations that campaigns emphasize, a phenomenon termed ‘priming’. In two recent studies, however, Gabriel Lenz concludes that reanalysis of key instances of priming in the literature shows that priming of views on policy questions, or ‘issues’, is very rare. This article revisits issue priming during elections by incorporating individuals who are largely excluded from Lenz’s analyses: respondents who, in one or more waves of the panel surveys analyzed, did not report a major-party vote (or vote intention) when interviewed. Based on data collected during six national elections, the article finds clear evidence of issue priming. The findings have implications for the study of campaign effects, media influence and voting behavior generally.

Keywords

primingissue votinglearningcampaign effects
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 513 - 531
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science, Memorial University (email: scott.matthews@mun.ca). The original version of this article was prepared for presentation at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL in April 2014. The author thanks Richard Johnston, Laron Williams, Austin Hart, Amanda Bittner, Mark Pickup and Alan Jacobs for helpful comments on earlier versions; Denver McNeney for research assistance; and five anonymous reviewers for their criticism and advice. Data replication sets are available at http://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123416000715.

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