Priming Under Fire

Abstract

This study reevaluates the classic “media priming” hypothesis, which argues that, when news coverage raises an issue’s salience, voters align their overall evaluation of the president with their assessment of him on that issue. Conventional studies typically show greater correspondence between issue approval and overall approval among individuals exposed to issue-related news. Although this is taken as evidence of media priming, this phenomenon is also consistent with another explanation. Precisely the opposite, the “projection” hypothesis argues that voters exposed to issue news align their approval of the president on that issue with their prior approval of his overall performance. Existing studies cannot rule out this alternative, so we conduct a survey experiment to evaluate the priming and projection hypotheses jointly. Despite recent evidence in support of projection, we show that the causal arrow runs from issue approval to overall approval (media priming), not the reverse (projection).

Citation

Hart, A. & Middleton, J.A. (2014). Priming under fire: Reevaluating the classic media priming hypothesis. Journal of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381613001539