During economic downturns, people tend to hold the party in power responsible and vote accordingly. On the other hand, when people think their own finances are worsening, they rarely hold government accountable. Why do voters often put more emphasis on the national economy compared to their own pocketbooks? Researchers have accounted for this largely by focusing on the characteristics of individuals. While research has also paid some attention to the role that the news media can play in individuals? political and economic evaluations, less is known about the characteristics of economic news stories or how these news stories might affect the emphasis people place on the national economy or their own pocketbooks when making political evaluations. This research examines this phenomenon more closely by incorporating theories about how issue interpretations and opinions can be affected by message characteristics (i.e., news framing and impersonal influence) as well as theories about how distant people feel they are from an issue or an event (i.e., construal level theory). Methods include an analysis of the content of television and newspaper stories about the economy, and two national survey-based experiments conducted online.
The findings are useful to the journalism community by facilitating a more constructive role in democratic accountability. Understanding framing effects can show how news stories can be created to affect political accountability responsibly in relation to economic performance.
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. Additionally, the media can influence the relative weight each has in national political evaluations (Mutz, 1998). However, we only know some of the circumstances under which this phenomenon occurs. Thus, the goal of this project was to examine the conditions under which the news 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. It was argued that issues portrayed in the news with near or distant consequences could make personal and national issue perceptions more salient in presidential and policy evaluations depending on which type of consequences were given emphasis. Inflation and the Affordable Care Act were used as two experimental cases. The study additionally examined whether these relationships were stronger among different groups of individuals by taking into account knowledge, partisanship, interest, and real-world experience. Results from the content analysis indicate that newspapers and television news tend to portray politics with distant consequences. The experiments show that news content portrayed with near or distant consequences 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 established ones. Understanding these priming dynamics is important because political priming has both short and long-term consequences for public opinion. Intellectual Merit: Few studies have looked at how perceptions of personal and national experiences of issue factor into presidential evaluations experimentally; this study provides insight into processes involved in priming and also has consequences for the literature on sociotropic politics and self-interest. Moreover, it has implications for several fields: (1) it expands the communication literature, specifically media priming and framing, by identifying new frames and priming effects; (2) it expands the sociotropic politics and symbolic politics literatures from political science, which has few studies examining media influence; (3) this study also draws on construal level theory from psychology and applies it to media framing and political perceptions. Broader Impacts: The effects of framing policy issues have implications for the role of the media in a democracy and go to the heart of democratic accountability. By paying attention to some issues over others—or to certain issue interpretations—the media can shift what criteria citizens use to hold presidents accountable or to evaluate policies. Attention can be focused on issue interpretations that reflect well on the president or a policy, or it can be focused on issues interpretations that can reflect poorly on the president. Therefore, this study benefits society by showing how news stories can be created to affect political accountability. The data from this study will be made available for other scholars interested in replication or analysis. Academic papers from this work are being sent for submission to conferences and journals. Moreover, this work contributed to the education of a Ph.D. student, as well as seven undergraduate research assistants, who aided with various aspects of the project and shared their work as part of an undergraduate research forum. These students learned about conducting research and several have expressed an interest in continuing their studies at the graduate level. One has stayed involved as a research mentor for other undergraduate students. Thus, this proposal covers three core NSF strategies for broader impacts criteria.
