Does Issue Importance Predict Learning About Candidates?

A long-standing argument is that policy voting is more likely on issues the voter considers subjectively important. However, existing evidence is highly mixed. We leverage panel data from the 2008–2009 ANES Panel to investigate the relationship between subjective issue importance and a key mechanism thought to link it and policy voting: candidate knowledge. Using both lagged dependent variable and fixed-effect models, we find little evidence that subjective issue importance predicts candidate knowledge or learning. Our results suggest that one reason for lack of consensus about whether subjective issue importance moderates policy voting is the lack of a clear connection between it and this important mediator. Our results point to the need for stronger measures of subjective issue importance.

Political Ideology and Issue Importance

Past research has shown that issues vary significantly in their salience across citizens, explaining key outcomes in political behavior. Yet it remains unclear how individual-level differences in issue salience affect the measurement of latent constructs in public opinion, namely political ideology. In this paper, we test whether scaling approaches that fail to incorporate individual-level differences in issue salience could understate the predictive power of ideology in public opinion research. To systematically examine this assertion, we employ a series of latent variable models which incorporate both issue importance and issue position. We compare the results of these different and diverse scaling approaches to two survey data sets, investigating the implications of accounting for issue salience in constructing latent measures of ideology. Ultimately, we find that accounting for issue importance adds little information to a more basic approach that uses only issue positions, suggesting ideological signals for measurement models reside most prominently in the issue positions of individuals rather than the importance of those issues to the individual.

What to think about

This study examines how agenda setting works on social media in the United States. Unlike previous platform studies, this research seeks to examine not just if, but also how agenda setting works in a social media setting. Three areas were tested for their effect on issue salience: repetition, story order, and endorsement. More than 360 U.S. participants viewed variations of a mock Facebook feed and answered questions about issue importance. Using issue importance as the dependent variable and repetition, story order, and endorsement as the independent variables, three hypotheses were tested. One hypothesis had the effect predicted: Increased repetition of a news story topic did influence participants’ perception that the news story topic was important. Additional items were tested as covariates. Gender, and ethnicity had a significant influence on perceived story importance. The results of this study indicate that agenda setting on social media occurs through repetition. Implications are explored.