American election in the 21st century
The increasing importance of news coverage of political campaigns in mass media, radio, cable TV and broadcast TV has made 21st century American elections hard to stomach. A crucial issue is how much the coverage influences the choices of voters, and how such influences differ from one voter to the other. The differences arise from the degree to which a person watches TV news and the other one is the strength of party identification by a voter. Stable preferences emerging from deeply held ideologies or attitudes like party identification forms the basis of voters’ choices, which means that a person with deeply held party identification is less likely to be influenced by the media on his or her vote choice. Media influence is less than party identification influence.
Party identification
America’s elections
Voters Choice
Media coverage
The various variables that could be used from the American National Election Study include those variables that consider voters attitudes and partisanship towards various parties. These variables includes the feelings they have about parties (whether a strong or not very strong Democrat or republican, party identification (whether independent, republican or democrat), closeness to one’s party (closer to the democratic or republican parties), party performance (differences in the manifestos of the involved parities. Another variable that could be to test this thesis includes the media, that is, how the respondents use the news media like internet, radio, television and newspapers. The use of party identification as a variable could be important in finding out the public opinion since it can use various measures such as strong , very strong , closer to the party or even independent. The media variable can be used to check whether voter’s choice is related to their usage of media coverage.
The dependent variables includes the feeling of voters about parties, party identification, closeness to one’s party , party performance and parties’ roles , and voters choice. Independent variables the frequency with which the voters used the news media – frequency of watching news in television, viewing internet news and listening to radio. The antecedent variable includes the kind of news media used; confounding variable includes the frequency of using the media while intervening variable includes lack of using news media coverage among the voters.
Hypothesis:
Parties’ identification forms the bases on which voters choices are made, such that the voters that have strong party identification are less likely to be influenced by the news media
People who follow the news media coverage have very strong party identification than those who have no strong connection to their party.
Following the news media coverage has less impact on voters’ choices than parties’ voter identification in American elections.
The Pearson correlation tests can be used to test the first test in order to measure the strength of the relationship between the party identification of the voters to their choices in their American elections.
Simple regression can be used to test how the degree or frequency of following media coverage influences on the how voters strongly identify with their parties. The following of news media coverage becomes the predictor variable while strength in party identification become the outcome variable.
Paired T-test can be used to test the difference in following media coverage and party identification in voting outcome.
