THE ILLUSION OF INTIMACY TELEVISION AND THE ROLE OF CANDIDATE PERSONAL QUALITIES IN VOTER CHOICE

The role of television in the increased candidate orientedness of voters in U.S. presidential elections was examined using data from eight National Election Studies conducted by the Survey Research Center at The University of Michigan. The importance of candidate personal qualities and traits was estimated using voter responses to open-ended questions about the candidates. Candidate personal qualities became more important for television dependent voters during the 1960s, and in each post-1964 election were less important for voters who relied on newspapers than for those who relied on television. The differences did not appear to be a function of the higher level of education of newspaper readers. The availability of over thirty years of carefully collected survey data has made possible the study of change in how voters choose among presidential candidates. An important finding of studies utilizing these data is the increased importance of candidate personal qualities (see, among others, Popkin et al., 1976; and Kirkpatrick et al., 1975). Coincident with this change has been the birth and development of television, now the most widely used medium of political information. This paper examines the role of television in the increased candidate-orientedness of the public, and offers empirical support for the proposition that television has facilitated and encouraged vote choices based upon the personal qualities of candidates. Television's potential for affecting the criteria of choice in elections was noted from the start. Looking ahead to the first "TV election," Jack Gould, television critic for the New York Times, wrote in the summer of 1952 that SCOTT KEETER is Director of the Commonwealth Poll in the Survey Research Laboratory, and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. The data were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, which bears no responsibility for the analysis and interpretation presented here. The author wishes to thank John Brigham, William Gormley, Gerald Pomper, and this journal's anonymous reviewers who commented upon earlier drafts. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 51:344-358 ?) 1987 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press / 0033-362X/87/0051-00/$2.50 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.115 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 05:08:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Candidate Personal Qualities and Voter Choice 345 a TV-aware electorate is not going to be voting for a man merely on the basis of his reputation, or his thoughts as recorded in the printed word, or his disembodied voice as it comes out of a loudspeaker. Television makes the candidate of today a human being at one's elbow, who is going to be judged on the same terms as a man greets any new acquaintance. (Gould 1972:21) Since then, television's image-making power is thought to have been influential in most elections, particularly in the Nixon-Kennedy debates, in Nixon's return to politics in 1968, and in Carter's campaign of trust and honesty in 1976. And yet the search for clear evidence of television's impact has been mostly futile. As Joseph Wagner's (1983) review of research indicates, except for event-specific or group-specific phenomena, the quantitative literature has for the most part confirmed the "minimal effects" thesis. Beyond this, content analyses of television and newspapers suggest that the two media present very similar images of candidates (Hofstetter, 1976; Meadow, 1973; Evarts and Stempel, 1974; Patterson, 1980). Voters' perceptions of the personal qualities of candidates do not appear to vary with the particular mix of their information sources (Patterson and McClure, 1976; Miller and Jackson, 1973). However, while voters may hold similar images of candidates regardless of how they obtain political information, the importance of candidate images-relative to other information-may be greater for voters who depend upon television. Despite similarities with other media, television by its nature provides a qualitatively different product. It provides the candidate as a person. This is a function of the visual and actual nature of television's content, and is reinforced by practices of its news organizations and personnel that serve to downplay cognitive content. Doris Graber's analysis of campaign news on television and newspapers supports this view: The skimpiness of television issue coverage, particularly the dearth of quotes by candidates, meant that people who relied primarily on television for campaign information learned little about the candidates' stands on issues and even less about the candidates' priorities. This left the television viewer with information weighted heavily in favor of using characteristics of the man, rather than issue positions, as voting criteria. (Graber, 1976:300301). Wagner (1983:415-426) provided evidence that the television's slighting of issues leaves the television-dependent voter less able to discriminate between candidates on the basis of issues (see also Clarke and Fredin, 1978). Thus, voters choose as best they can. Television makes information about candidates personal qualities cheaper to obtain than This content downloaded from 207.46.13.115 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 05:08:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms