Zaller (1992) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion

Chapter 1 The Fragmented State of Opinion Research
Independent variable: Coverage; different types include: objective news reports, partisan arguments, televised news conferences, paid advertisements.

Main ideas:
1. people differ in their habitual attention to politics and hence THEIR EXPOSURE to political information and argumentation in the media.



Chapter 3 How Citizens Acquire Information and Convert it into Public Opinion
Two important phenomena: 1.) how citizens come to learn about public matters and 2.) how they convert the information they acquire into an opinion.
Processing information: systematically thinking/processing vs. cognitive shortcuts/peripheral cues (O’Keefe 2002). OR cognitive and affective elements (Zaller).

Definitions:
Consideration: a belief concerning an object and an evaluation of that belief (40).
Persuasive Messages (41): arguments or images providing a reason for taking a position or point of view; if accepted by the individual, they become considerations.
Cueing Messages (42): consist of “contextual information;” they enable citizens to perceive relationships between the persuasive messages they receive and their political predictions, which in turn permits them to respond critically to the persuasive message. “Thus, a Republican voter will be more likely to reject a message if she/he recognizes that the person giving the message is a Democrat” (42).

Comm lit:
APPLICABILITY, ACCESSIBLE, AVAILABLE

Four AXIOMS about how individuals respond to political information they encounter:
1. RECEPTION AXIOM: the greater a person’s level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more likely h or she is to be exposed to and comprehend—to receive—political messages concerning that issue. This is not a general cognitive measurement. It sounds like its more of the “accessible” measurement, because it say ENGAGEMENT. Zaller defines it as a combination of affective engagement and intellectual engagement. Hmm… POLITICAL AWARENESS/sophistication: In the analysis…it is measured by means of a general measure of political knowledge (factual tests (43). It is a measure of general, chronic awareness.
2. RESISTANCE AXIOM: People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and the predispositions. The ability to resist…Inattentive people are more accepting of ideas they encounter. This brings in the idea of source credibility; see Petty & Cacioppo (1986) and Chaiken (1980). Factors they bring in: argument strength (weak vs. strong), involvement (low vs. high), and source credibility (high vs. low). “The experimental design involves two message types x two involvement conditions x two source types” (46).
3. ACCESSIBILITY AXIOM: The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related considerations from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use.
4. RESPONSE AXIOM: Individuals answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that are immediately salient or accessibly to them. ACCESSIBLE.