Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: The Influence of Competitive Elite Issue Framing on Public Opinion and Mass Partisanship

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Under what conditions can political elites influence public opinion? This dissertation research project examines the impact that issue salience and media coverage of partisan issue framing has on public opinion, mass partisanship, and issue evolution . While the power of framing has been oft-demonstrated , recent analyses suggest that when frames are pitted against each other, as they often are in news coverage, framing effects are significantly diminished. This project seeks to determine, through an experimental design and a content analysis of media coverage of several issues over time, the conditions under which partisan framing by political elites can impact public opinion and act as a mechanism that clarifies the process of mass partisan transformation. The intellectual merits and innovations of this project are (1) the extension of theories regarding the impact of framing on attitudes and public opinion to include issue salience and the partisanship of both the communicator and the receiver, (2) the creation of new data resources that will improve the ability of scholars to investigate the relationship between media coverage of issue frames and public opinion, and (3) the development of an explanatory mechanism that connects competing issue positions taken by political elites to the issue and partisanship preferences of the public. The project's content analysis examines the news media's coverage of four issues over 20-30 year periods: abortion, crime, U.S.-Iraq conflicts, and energy policy. The partisan nature of these issues has fluctuated greatly over time, providing the necessary variance to carefully determine the conditions under which public opinion changes. Coverage in The New York Times and Newsweek will be coded to determine the predominant frames used by political elites on each issue. The data will be analyzed by determining whether clear, competing, and consistent partisan frames were reported during periods that precede changes in public opinion (in both direction and overall salience) and mass partisanship. The experimental design will vary issue salience and the partisan label applied to various frames. Subjects will answer several demographic questions as well as questions that assess their opinions about ten issues: gay marriage, tax cuts, abortion, energy, social security, welfare, education, health care, gun control and crime.This research's broader impact and scientific contribution centers on the added insight this research will bring to the extant literature in political science and social psychology on the impact that partisan framing and salience have on public opinion and political partisanship. From a political science perspective, this project clarifies the conditions under which elite partisans can influence public opinion, providing the crucial link between elite partisans and mass partisans that helps explain the process of issue evolution as well as the influence of framing and the mass media on public opinion more generally. From a social psychology perspective, the project improves our understanding regarding the role of group membership on source credibility, how forewarning impacts resistance to persuasion, and the conditions under which attitude importance is strong enough to resist persuasion from credible sources.