Leadership Traits and Media Influence in Britain
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00946.x |
| Author | Jeffrey A. Karp,Daniel Stevens |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00946.x
Leadership Traits and Media Influence in Britainpost_946787..808
Daniel Stevens and Jeffrey A. Karp
University of Exeter
Although party leaders are now assumed to play a more important role in parliamentary elections, little is known about
how voters form opinions about leaders. In this article, we rely on theories of priming to investigate how media
exposure influences leadership evaluations. The analysis is based on a unique examination of the nature and dynamics
of leadership evaluations in Britain which combines survey data with media content data to investigate how
perceptions of character traits, and media influence on perceptions of character traits, affect leadership evaluations. Our
findings show that both the amount and the tone of newspaper media coverage can affect leadership evaluations which
could result in a gain or loss in party support.
Keywords: leadership traits; media effects; war in Iraq; Tony Blair; 2005 British election
Recent trends suggest that election campaigns matter more in Britain than in the past –
because voters’ preferences are less deeply rooted – and that media coverage of leaders may
play a key role in how much they matter. The aspects of leadership that count most for
voters and the extent of media influence are, however, not well understood.We know that
the media tend to focus more on process and personality than on issues in elections
(Deacon et al., 2001; Wring and Ward, 2010). But how this affects voters is unknown. In this
article we examine the structure of leadership evaluations and the influence of media on
them.
Party leaders now attract more attention than ever before – it is much easier for the
media to focus on a handful of leaders as symbols of their parties (McAllister, 2007, p. 287).
A media focus on leaders has also prompted a response from British parties, in which
‘leaders are increasingly the personification of their parties’ (Heffernan, 2006, p. 583). As
Richard Heffernan and Paul Webb (2005, p. 55) put it, ‘there is little doubt that the party
leaders figure extremely prominently in contemporary election campaigns in the UK, and
that this prominence has grown with the advent of televised campaigning ... Thus, the
increasingly presidential style of election campaigning in Britain is likely to prove an
enduring phenomenon’. In a system that is more leader focused, voters may take cues from
a leader’s character, just as they do to infer the qualities of people with whom they engage
in everyday life (Rahn et al., 1990).
Early research on character in the United States incorporated the notion of ‘presidential
prototypes’ against which presidents are judged (Kinder et al., 1980). Competence and
trustworthiness emerged as ‘the preeminent traits for presidents and presidential hopefuls’
(Kinder, 1983, p. 1). Numerous studies since have both confirmed the influence of character
evaluations in American elections and the centrality of competence and integrity in those
evaluations ( Bishin et al., 2006; Funk, 1996; 1997; 1999; Goren, 2002; 2007). However, the
influence of such considerations in Britain is not well understood, let alone the extent to
which the media affect these evaluations.1
© 2012 The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
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DA N I E L S T E V E N S A N D J E F F R E Y A . K A R P
Media Effects in British Elections
As in the United States, contemporary research into media effects in Britain has challenged
the former minimal effects orthodoxy. Media coverage in Britain may change economic
perceptions (Gavin and Sanders, 1997; 2003; Sanders et al., 1993) and, when the allegiance
of some newspapers changed between 1992 and 1997, appears to have had a large impact
on vote choice (Ladd and Lenz, 2009; Newton and Brynin, 2001). More typically, in the
absence of clear evidence of media persuasion, some studies have maintained that news-
paper reading can reinforce existing political preferences ( Brynin and Newton, 2003; Harrop,
1987).
On the other hand, media effects in British elections seem quite limited (Andersen et al.,
2005; Norris and Sanders, 2001; Norris et al., 1999). The picture is typically of a disconnect
between what the media highlight in elections and what the public considers important
(see, for example, Butler and Kavanagh, 2002; Deacon et al., 2001; Kavanagh and Butler,
2005; Miller, 1991, p. 249; Norris, 2006). The result is that research on elections often
ignores media impact entirely (see Norris, 2006, p. 195).
Despite such attitudes and the sparse evidence, there is a growing recognition of the
possibility of media effects in British elections. British consumption of news media is high:
about nine in ten people (89 per cent) reported using television as their main source of
information on political issues during the 2005 general election campaign and more than
half (54 per cent) said they read their local newspaper for the same purpose (Electoral
Commission, 2005, p. 31). Most national newspapers in Britain are partisan and take a clear
and explicit party line in their editorials and their reporting of daily news ( Brynin and
Newton, 2003), albeit the strong pro-Conservative bias of many newspapers in the 1980s
has dissipated without being replaced by equivalent sentiment towards New Labour ( Bartle,
2005) or latterly towards David Cameron and his coalition government.
While priming is often mentioned in studies of media effects in Britain, empirical tests
of its extent and nature are lacking. Studies of British media effects tend to focus on
associations between audience usage of media, particularly different press sources, and
attitudes and behaviour, rather than coverage and content – the kinds of stories that appear
in an individual’s newspaper. Accounts of the 2005 election refer to the benefits of Labour’s
positive record on the economy, problems provided by the war in Iraq, and the failure of the
Conservative party to capitalise on Labour’s vulnerabilities as explanations for the result
(e.g. Norris and Wlezien, 2005). Leadership evaluations enter some explanations (Evans and
Andersen, 2005), but again what lies behind them and the role of the campaign are largely
unknown.
Conceptually, the literature on media effects in Britain often mentions potential agenda
setting and priming effects but only rarely tests for the former. Priming ‘refers to changes
in the standards that people use to make political evaluations’ (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987, p.
63). Media priming occurs when the news media’s increased attention to a subject changes
its impact on evaluations of leaders such as the president in the US or the prime minister
in Britain – ‘voters will use issues that are more salient in the news media than those that
are not because salient information should be more available’ ( Jenkins, 2002, p. 391). Media
influence on perceptions of leaders is particularly likely in a system characterised by valence
© 2012 The Authors. Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2012, 60(4)
L E A D E R S H I P T R A I T S
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politics (Clarke et al., 2004), where voters may draw cues about a prospective government’s
competence from the person at the top.
Data and Methods
We take a novel approach to the question of priming effects in Britain by combining
content analysis of press coverage with daily tracking of public opinion during the 2005
general election. The public opinion data, collected as part of the 2005 British Election
Study (BES), are based on a panel design that incorporates a rolling cross-section survey
(RCS). The essence of the design is to administer a baseline survey before the campaign
and then to re-interview the same respondents on a randomly chosen day during the
course of the campaign (and then again after the election). With a different slice of the
original sample interviewed on each day of the campaign a picture of the dynamics of
the election emerges.
The 2005 BES included a baseline survey (n = 7,793) which first went into the field on
7 March, two months before the election, and was completed on 4 April. The sample was
drawn from a panel recruited by YouGov, with respondents completing surveys online.2
Random selection for interview during the election campaign commenced on 6 April. The
number of interviews completed on a daily basis varied considerably, ranging from a low of
59 to a high of 279, yielding a total panel of 6,059 respondents.3
As measures of character, we rely on a series of items that asked respondents about their
perceptions of Tony Blair’s competence as a leader, his responsiveness to voters’ concerns
and his trustworthiness.4 Responses were collected in the baseline pre-campaign survey and
are thus not influenced by events unfolding during the campaign. Of course these percep-
tions will already be influenced by partisanship and perceptions of Blair. Our interest,
however, is not in these associations but in how they interact with the press coverage during
the campaign to affect leadership evaluations. Leadership evaluations are based on ther-
mometer ratings ranging from strongly dislike (0) to strongly like (10).5 We examine Blair’s
leadership evaluations rather than voting for Labour because they provide a cleaner test of
priming effects.6
Unfortunately, the 2005 BES did not include any items measuring individual exposure
to television newscasts and magazines, so we must...
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