Does the Messenger Matter? Candidate-Media Agenda Convergence and Its Effects on Voter Issue Salience

Abstract

Though research has shown that candidates and the media can influence the importance voters ascribe to political issues, little work has sought to test the interactive agenda-setting effects of each—in particular, to determine whether the ability of candidates to set the public's agenda depends on the media's willingness to reflect their issue emphases. Using an experiment conducted during the early stages of the 2006 Texas gubernatorial election, the author shows that candidate attempts to influence voter issue salience are most effective when the media focus on the same topics. The findings suggest the value for candidates of enlisting the news media in helping to pass their messages along and serve as a point of departure for more work on the influence of candidate-media agenda convergence.