MEDIA USE AND ELECTORAL CHOICES: SOME POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF INFORMATION EXPOSURE

Abstract

Increasing partisan use of television has created not only a new campaign style but a new set of political forces potentially capable of effecting widespread change in electoral behavior. The question therefore arises what effect the use of mass media has had on electoral choices. Analysis of five sets of presidential election survey data from the Survey Research Center lends support to the traditional intra-election floating voter hypothesis as well as its more generalized inter-election version—that voters least exposed to current political information tend to change their vote preferences more readily within a single campaign as well as switch their vote from one party to another at two successive elections. The same body of data fails to support the “reformulated” intra-election version recently advanced by Converse—that the least exposed voters are highly stable in their voting preferences.