Another group of studies has used the tone of news media coverage of a candidate as a predictor of his or her electoral success and public opinion of the candidate. Using both hand coding (Hopmann et al., 2010; Soroka et al., 2009) and, in recent years, automated sentiment analysis (Bélanger & Soroka, 2012), researchers have argued that the valence of coverage can influence voters, with more positive coverage contributing to electoral successes (Hopmann et al., 2010; Soroka et al., 2009). For example,
Kleinnijenhuis et al. (2007) examined four news types: issue positions, real-world developments, support and criticism of political actors, and news on the success and failure of political actors. The last two of these offer direct positive or negative
assessment of candidates from different perspectives, attributing affective judgement to the candidates themselves, their positions, or their actions.
Evidence has shown that the effect of tone might be weaker for voters who were already decided on their favored candidate before the elections (Fournier, Nadeau, Blais, Gidengil, & Nevitte, 2004) and stronger for initially undecided voters who selected their candidate during the campaign. This is similar to the differentiation between crystallizers
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and early deciders that Lazarsfeld et al. (1968) draw out, and offers an interesting contrast with evidence showing that advertising tone can have a stronger impact on already-
decided voters for the candidate that they support (this will be discussed later in the context of tone’s impact on electoral success in direct communication channels; Krupnikov, 2011).
While most studies in this area have used cross-sectional research designs and time-series models, experimental evidence for the effect has also been provided (Norris et al., 1999). Experimental findings support the notion that the impact of tone of coverage is not uniform. First, it can differ for different types of voters, as mentioned above in the context of early-deciders and those who decide during the campaign. Second,
experimental findings point toward an effect for positive coverage but not for negative coverage. As recent evidence shows, the tone of coverage can have a “backfiring” effect in cases when negativity in coverage collides with voters’ pre-dispositions (Geiß & Schäfer, 2017). However, it should also be noted that the extent to which effects found in experimental studies are long-term and enduring, and therefore meaningful in the context of real elections, remains an open question.
While many studies provide empirical support for the link between tone of
coverage and voting behavior (often in ways that mirror research on the impact of volume of coverage for electoral success), theoretical elaborations on the nature of this effect has been rather minimal. Most researchers simply point to the apparent and logical
connection between positive coverage and voters’ positive dispositions toward a candidate, as it seems self-evident that more positive coverage will make a candidate more favorable while negative coverage will make a candidate less favorable. However,
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as mentioned above, there is also evidence to contrary, showing that the impact of news coverage tone on electoral success is a more complicated phenomenon moderated by various features of the voters, the political actors, and the media outlet. As a result, researchers have recently begun to offer a more elaborate framework for understanding the impact of tone on electoral success.
Researchers have taken up the contested theory of second-level agenda setting as a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between tone of coverage and electoral success (Balmas & Sheafer, 2010; Coleman & Wu, 2010; McCombs, Llamas, Lopez-Escobar, & Rey, 1997). While first-level agenda setting explores the impact of issue salience on perceived issue importance, second-level agenda setting focuses on the salience of issue or object attributes and the extent to which these are presented in a positive, negative, or a neutral manner. For example, first-level agenda setting might focus on how coverage of a candidate’s character might affect the perception of that candidate, second-level agenda setting would explore what features of this candidate’s character are highlighted and whether these are presented as favorable or unfavorable to that candidate. For instance, highlighting the trustworthiness or untrustworthiness of a candidate will have a different impact, even though both highlight the same feature in a candidate’s character.
Second-level agenda setting thus suggests that it is necessary to examine not only the cognitive and substantive attributes of an object, but also the affective attributes connected to it—in other words, to look not only at the volume of coverage, or the topics covered, but also to the manner in which these topics are covered (McCombs et al., 1997). Moreover, there may be interactions between these two sets of attributes, or the
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two levels of agenda setting, with negative affect attached to an issue, for example, increasing its prominence with viewers due to a negativity bias (Sheafer, 2007).
Another theoretical framework that has been offered to explain the impact of tone of coverage on candidate electoral success is affective priming (Sheafer, 2007). This examines the direct and indirect impact of the affective attributes attached to various issues. Priming (or at least some interpretation of priming used in political
communication) can be seen as an extension of agenda setting (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007). If agenda setting examines the impact of object salience in the media on the object’s perceived importance, then priming is the result of this heightened perceived importance on object evaluation. By changing the importance of a political issue, the media can influence the standard by which a candidate is evaluated. For example, changing the standard of evaluation from foreign affairs issues to economic issues might negatively or positively affect candidate favorability. However, this leaves an important question open—how does issue prominence impact evaluation? Why do some issues influence an evaluation in a positive manner and others in a negative manner?
Some explanations, which will be elaborated on later, relate to issue ownership and candidate performance as possible answers to these questions. Highlighting an issue such as social welfare might automatically aid one side of the political map more if that party or candidate is considered a priori more credible or capable in treating this issue (see later discussion on issue ownership; Petrocik, 1996; Sigelman & Buell, 2004). In other cases, some issues might be affectively charged in advance, thus lending candidates a positive or negative effect by dint of having highlighted particular issues. Finally, some issues might not naturally lend themselves to a positive or negative evaluation in this more
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automatic manner. In these instances, the affective attribute attached to an issue can change its priming effect. For example, while economic issues can be highlighted to increase their centrality to candidate evaluation, presenting the issues in a positive (economic growth) or negative (economic decline) light can change the impact that the priming of economic issues will have on voters’ evaluation of an incumbent (or a challenger). Thus, the tone not only applies to the candidates themselves, but to the contexts in which they are mentioned and the issues to which they attach themselves (Sheafer, 2007).
Based on these previous findings on the impact of tone of coverage on candidates’ electoral success and the theoretical explanations offered above, I formalize the following hypothesis:
H2: The tone of news coverage that a candidate receives is positively correlated with that candidate’s electoral success, with more positive coverage being related to
higher success.