It is well recognized that the 1993 election campaign catapulted the Reform party into the
national political scene, but our understanding of how this was possible is quite limited.
Drawing on the work in cognitive psychology on attitude change, the work on the news
media coverage of elections, and the political science work on election campaigns, this
thesis locates the impetus for Reform's success in the dynamic flow of information about
the party that was available in television news broadcasts and voters' likelihood of being
persuaded by that information. This link is developed by an analysis that makes use of a
content analysis of the 1993 campaign, the 1993 Canadian Election Study, and a merged
analysis of the election and news data.
The Reform party began the campaign as a minor component of the news coverage of the
election, but the news media coverage changed dramatically. Reform was provided with
more news access than its support indicated it deserved and that coverage focused on what
became a major theme of the election; the welfare state and the role of government.
Coverage of Reform underwent a further change as it both decreased and focused on
cultural issues during the last two weeks of the campaign. Using a two-mediator model of
attitude change, the analysis shows that people who were predisposed to agree with
Reform's anti-welfare state message and who were likely to be aware of the news
information, changed both their perceptions of the party and increased their support for the
party. Further support for the impact of the media is derived from the analysis of voter
response to the second change in news coverage.
The analysis suggests that campaigns do matter, but that the size of the impact is dependent
upon the underlying uncertainty associated with the parties and candidates, and on the
degree to which the information flow of the campaign changes. The information flow
contributes to both learning and priming among people who receive and accept new
information. While voters respond reasonably to new information, the outcome will
depend on what information voters are given and what information actually reaches the
habitually unaware segments of the population.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/9979 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Jenkins, Richard W. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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