The Context of Priming

Abstract

The existence of priming (i.e. the fact that the standards people use to make political evaluations shift in response to changes in media coverage of political issues) has become generally accepted. However, most of the evidence for the priming mechanism comes from experiments or analyses of certain specific events. This article presents evidence of priming from a longitudinal study of the Danish population's evaluation of the Danish government. The study consists of 12 measurements over four years from 1999 to 2003. The analysis indicates that priming effects are often moderated by political knowledge, but that the effect changes from case to case. The article shows that both the overall priming effects and the effect of the moderator are contingent on the political context of the priming situation. Important aspects of the moderating context are message intensity, the easiness of the issue, the politicisation of the issue, the assessment of the government's issue responsibility and the timing of the evaluation.