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Retrospective and Prospective Performance Assessments during the 2004 Election Campaign: Tests of Mediation and News Media Priming

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Abstract

According to many theoretical accounts of the vote choice, distal determinants (e.g., party identification) influence proximal determinants (e.g., perceptions of candidates), which in turn shape candidate preferences. Yet almost no research on voting has formally tested such mediational hypotheses. Using national survey data collected between February and September of 2004, this paper begins by illustrating how to conduct such investigations. We explored whether public approval of President Bush’s handling of a series of specific national problems (e.g., the Iraq war) influenced overall assessments of his job performance and evaluations of his likely future performance versus John Kerry’s, which in turn shaped vote choices. The results are consistent with the claim of mediation and shed additional light on the impact of various issues on the 2004 election outcome. We also tested what we term the “dosage hypothesis,” derived from news media priming theory, which posits that changes in the amount of media coverage of an issue during the course of a campaign should precipitate changes in the weight citizens place on that issue when evaluating the president’s overall job performance, particularly among citizens most exposed to the news. Surprisingly, this analysis did not yield consistent support for the venerable dosage hypothesis, suggesting that the conditions under which priming occurs should be specified much more precisely in future work.

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Notes

  1. ABC conducted more pre-election surveys, but we focused on only these five because these were the only questionnaires including the complete set of measures that we needed to allow identical analyses to be conducted at all waves. This permitted us to make over-time comparisons of coefficients for the same equations.

  2. In all waves except 2/10, Ralph Nader was explicitly mentioned. In all waves except 9/23, Nader voters were asked: “If Nader does not run or is not on the ballot, for whom would you vote—Bush or Kerry?” We used responses to this follow-up in constructing our measure of intended vote choice. For the 2/10 wave, ABC News specifically asked a question dealing with a general election contest between Bush and Kerry, making it directly comparable to the questions in later waves. Even though Kerry did not have the requisite number of delegates secured at this point in time, ABC News asked this question because it was evident that Kerry was going to be the nominee based on his victories (often resounding) in 12 of 14 primaries up to that point.

  3. We tested a series of different lags, all of which yielded similar but weaker results. Standard methodology for event analysis is to assume that the event window that produces the most significant difference is the correct one (see Rogerson, 1989), and we did so here.

  4. Variance inflation factors (VIFs) for the regression models in Table 6 vary between 5 and 6, suggesting the presence of multicollinearity. Multicollinearity does not bias coefficient estimates; it only inflates standard errors. But with our large samples, we had considerable power to detect real differences between coefficients. And the replication of similar coefficient patterns across surveys was reassuring about their validity. Most importantly, when we estimated the regression coefficients removing various terms from the equations, our substantive conclusions were consistently sustained, suggesting that our results do not reflect fragile and unstable parameter or significance level estimates. Finally, multicollinearity would not affect the over-time correlations of coefficient estimates and media content, which are presented in Table 8 and discussed below.

  5. Wald tests were used to test linear hypotheses (see Judge, Griffiths, Hill, Lutkepohl, & Lee, 1985, pp. 20–28). The Iraq coefficient was significantly larger than the economy coefficient only in the 5/20 and 9/23 waves (p = .03 and p = .004, respectively). The economy coefficient was significantly larger than the terrorism coefficient only in the 2/10 wave (p = .01).

  6. Other domains (e.g. education, health care) were also asked about in some individual waves. We included only Iraq, the economy, and terrorism to produce across-wave comparability, because these were the three domains asked about in every wave. When we re-estimated the regressions in Table 1 using all possible domains that were asked about, the rank ordering of Iraq, the economy, and terrorism remained unchanged.

  7. The z-statistic assessing across-wave changes in the coefficients β 1 and β 2 was simply calculated by: \( \frac{{\beta _1 - \beta _2 }} {{\sqrt {\text{var} (\beta _1 ) + \text{var} (\beta _2 )} }}.\)

  8. We dichotomized in this fashion to yield two groups of about equal size.

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Acknowledgment

We thank Gary Langer, Dan Merkle, and Jon Cohen of ABC News for sharing these data with us and for their helpful comments on the manuscript. Jon Krosnick is University Fellow at Resources for the Future.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Stanford University, Encina Hall West, Room 100, Stanford, CA, 94305-6044, USA

    Neil Malhotra

  2. Departments of Communication, Political Science, and Psychology, Stanford University, 434 McClatchy Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Jon A. Krosnick

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  1. Neil Malhotra
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  2. Jon A. Krosnick
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Correspondence to Neil Malhotra.

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Jon Krosnick is a University Fellow at Resources for the Future, Washington, DC, USA.

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Malhotra, N., Krosnick, J.A. Retrospective and Prospective Performance Assessments during the 2004 Election Campaign: Tests of Mediation and News Media Priming. Polit Behav 29, 249–278 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-007-9027-8

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