Indeed, both the proximity and directional schools implicitly agree that issues matter, and so challenge the Michigan school's strong scepticism on the import of issues. The question of how much issues affect the vote, however, has been neglected. That debate, engaging both technical and conceptual issues, has focused entirely on how issues play in an election, whether voters prefer the party that is closest to their own position or the party that is the strongest defender of their side on an issue. The main debate in the issue voting literature recently has been between the directional and proximity models. Relatively little attention has been paid to where these literatures overlap and less still to the simple but basic question: which matters most, the issues or the economy? For the most part, however, these amount to two separate streams of research. There is a rich and vast literature dealing with issue voting and an equally impressive literature concerning economic voting. The objective of this study is to assess and compare the relative impact of issues and the economy on the vote in democratic elections. Social media also have a mere exposure effect, and a multistep flow effect that amplifies news about party successes and failures from self-selected mass media.
The latter do more than just reinforce predispositions.
Combined effects emerge because many people use both mass media and social media. Political perceptions and preferences are affected by news statements in self-selected mass media on issue positions, support and criticism, real world conditions and success and failure, in accordance with the theories on agenda setting and issue ownership, social identity, retrospective voting and bandwagon effects, respectively. For the 2017 Dutch national elections, such data is available. Estimating these combined effects requires the best possible, albeit different, measures of news obtained from self-selected mass media and social media that can be linked to panel survey data concerning perceptions and preferences. Changes in political perceptions and preferences may result from the combined effects of news from various media.
0 kommentar(er)
