Media and campaign effects on vote choice at national elections in Europe : a review of a multilingual research landscape

This article reviews the empirical research literature on campaign and media effects on vote choice at national elections in European countries for the post-World War II period. Particular efforts are undertaken to obtain a comprehensive picture by including publications in many different languages. With regard to the amount of research, but also the topics addressed, the survey reveals considerable differences between countries. Studies of campaign effects have focused on the temporal dynamics of campaigns, on the modes of campaign communications (such as personal contacts at the local level, advertising on TV and in the press or online social media) and on certain aspects of its content. Research on media effects has explored the role of partisan bias and certain topical categories of news (climate of opinion, issue and candidate coverage) as well as specific new media formats, notably televised candidate debates and vote advice applications (VAA). Overall, the review reveals that there is little in the way of an integrated and consolidated body of campaign and media effects research on national elections in Europe. While political communication research increasingly acknowledges the potential importance of news media and political parties’ electioneering for voting behaviour, there appears as of yet to be little convergence regarding approaches and research findings. Particularly striking is the degree to which research questions are guided by national institutional contexts

Measuring the structure and stability of opinion in mass publics

This thesis examines the structure and stability of public opinion in a sample of Canadian respondents. The data consist of a three-wave panel of 1790 cases; the interviews were conducted in 1977, 1979 and 1980 as part of the Social Change in Canada project of the Institute for Behavioral Research of York University. In the first part of the thesis various theoretical and methodological issues pertinent to the study of mass political attitudes are discussed and a research strategy is proposed. In the second part, factor analysis is used to extract structural information from the data. It is found that the opinions of English-speaking respondents can be described in terms of four fundamental dimensions which are given the tentative labels of "welfare liberalism," "nostalgic conservatism," "pro-business," and "provincial rights." For French-speaking respondents, two dimensions are found: "welfare liberalism" and "protection of French-Canadian society." Finally, regression analysis is performed on factor-based scales to obtain more information about the opinion structures. The central finding is that it is indeed possible to use mass survey data to identify a simple structure of political beliefs of the Canadian public, and to tie this structure to the political and social makeup of the country.Arts, Faculty ofPolitical Science, Department ofGraduat