Selective Exposure to Campaign Communication: The Role of Anticipated Agreement and Issue Public Membership

Abstract

This article explores two hypotheses about how voters encounter information during campaigns. According to the anticipated agreement hypothesis, people prefer to hear about candidates with whom they expect to agree. The ''issue publics'' hypothesis posits that voters choose to encounter information on issues they consider most important personally. We tested both hypotheses by distributing a multimedia CD offering extensive information about George W. Bush and Al Gore to a representative sample of registered voters with personal computers and home Internet connections during the closing weeks of the 2000 campaign. Exposure to information was measured by tracking individuals' use of the CD. The evidence provided strong support for the issue public hypothesis and partial support for the anticipated agreement hypothesis. Republicans and conservatives preferred to access information about George Bush, but Democrats and liberals did not prefer information about Vice President Gore. No interactions appeared between these two forms of selective exposure. We designed this study to explore individual differences in exposure to campaign information. Monitoring the information choices of a large sample of voters over the course of a campaign is a challenging task. We used a relatively new form of campaign communication (a multimedia CD-Rom), which made it possible to track the information voters saw fit to encounter. By providing real voters with real information about real candidates in the context of a significant election (the 2000 presidential election), our research design permitted us to test a pair of long-standing hypotheses (1) the ''anticipated agreement'' hypothesis-people seek out information about candidates with whom they expect to agree and avoid information about candidates with whom they expect to disagree; and (2) the ''issue public hypothesis''-people seek out information on policy issues to which they attach a great deal of personal importance.We begin by reviewing the literature on voluntary exposure to political information and outlining the theoretical rationale for the hypotheses. Next, we describe our methodology, outline the findings, and spell out their implications for understanding voter behavior and campaign communication more generally.

Partisanship and Preference Formation: Competing Motivations, Elite Polarization, and Issue Importance

“…A key moderator of issue motivated reasoning and the degree to which people defend their existing attitudes is personal issue importance (Leeper 2014;Visser et al 2004). Research analyzes the effects of issue importance for information seeking (Iyengar et al 2008;Kim 2009) and reveals, ''issue importance is a primary motivation in political information consumption'' (Kim 2007, p. 187; see also Jerit 2007). Krosnick et al (1994) suggest that when people consider an issue personally important, they ''expend the energy required by elaborative processing…[which] involves evaluating and relating new information to the information already stored in a person's memory' ' (401-402).…”

Is ideology the enemy of inquiry? Examining the link between political orientation and lack of interest in novel data

“…Indeed, there is evidence that people with extreme views (Brock & Balloun, 1967;Brannon, et al, 2007;Knobloch-Westerwick & Ment, 2009;cf., Taber & Lodge, 2006) and people with conservative views (Iyengar et al, 2008;Lavine et al, 2005;cf., Knobloch-Westerwich & Meng, 2009) show greater POLITICAL ORIENTATION AND DATA SELECTION 6 confirmation bias, reflecting a disinterest in information that contradicts their existing views. It remains unclear, however, whether these findings extend to interest in new, unbiased information.…”

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“…(See Kunda 1990 and Molden and Higgins 2005 for reviews.) First, people tend to seek out information that confirms their beliefs and avoid information that is inconsistent with those views (Taber and Lodge 2006;Stroud 2008;Iyengar et al 2008;Iyengar and Hahn 2009). They are also likely to process information with a bias toward their pre-existing views, disparaging contradictory information while uncritically accepting information that is consistent with their beliefs (Lord, Ross and Lepper 1979;Edwards and Smith 1996;Taber and Lodge 2006).…”