Partisan choices in a direct-democratic campaign

Ever since Lazarsfeld and his colleagues' (1944) seminal study, it has become common wisdom that election campaigns, if anything, serve the activation of voters' fundamental predispositions. However, disagreement emerges on the role of partisan orientations. Although some authors consider them as fundamental predispositions, which are activated during the campaign and subsequently act as filters for incoming information, others argue that party attachments are simple running tallies of political assessments, which are constantly updated in response to campaign events, or decision shortcuts for voters innocent of substantial information. In this study, we scrutinize the role of partisan orientations in a direct-democratic campaign using data from a panel survey fielded during the run-up to the 2006 Swiss asylum law referendum. We find that, as voters accumulate knowledge in the course of the campaign, vote intentions dramatically converge on pre-campaign partisan orientations. Moreover, voters, whose earlier issue-specific and partisan orientations collide, tend to resolve their ambivalence in favour of their partisan leanings. These results corroborate the view of partisanship as a fundamental predispositio

The effects of repetitive news framing on political opinions over time

This study tests how repeated exposure to the same news frame influences political opinions over time. In a survey experiment (N = 296), we repeatedly exposed participants to the same news frame (at the start of the study, after one day, one week, and two weeks) and measured effects on opinions (at the start, after two weeks, and after six weeks). Participants in a control group were exposed only once and the effect was also traced over time. Results show that repetitive framing leads both to stronger and more persistent effects than single exposure. The persistence effects are most evident for individuals with moderate political knowledge. Our study contributes to a more comprehensive model of framing effects in mass communication experiments

Information and Arena: The Dual Function of the News Media for Political Elites

Abstract: How do individual politicians use the news media to reach their political goals? This study addresses the question by proposing an actor-centered, functional approach. We distinguish 2 essential functions (and subfunctions) the mass media have for political elites. The media are a source of information; politicians depend on it for pure information and they can profit from the momentum generated by media information. The media also are an arena elites need access to in order to promote themselves and their issues. These 2 functions offer certain politicians a structural advantage over others and, hence, are relevant for the power struggle among political elites. A systematic functional account enables comparisons of the role of the media across politicians and political systems