The least-informed citizens dominate shifts in presidential approval

Evidence

A final implication of our findings involves stepping back and taking a normative stance on the matter of political change. Exposure to political information through mass media varies enormously across the U.S. public. Some citizens are constantly preoccupied with the flow of political news while others are utterly indifferent to it. Not surprisingly, those who are most heavily exposed to political news also accumulate the most political knowledge. The devoted viewer, listener, and reader becomes society’s political expert. With this in mind, we might expect that it would be the expert who would be most influenced by changes in the media’s agenda. In the case of the Iran- Contra affair, the news media’s daily updating would presumably have the greatest impact on citizens who absorbed the complete story and the least impact on those exposed only to fragments of it. Our results suggest just the opposite. Citizens with the least knowledge (and presumably the least exposure) manifested the largest priming effects. Thus, change in support for the president in response to the Iran-Contra revelations appears to have been dominated by the least-informed, a result that has troubling implications for the exercise of power in Washington. Presidents who enjoy popular support typically have success in shaping the political agenda of the nation (Kernell, 1986; Rivers & Rose, 1985). Our findings suggest that change over time in popular approval—and thus the waxing and waning of presidential power—may depend the most on the citizens who know the least. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1628

Categorization

• XREF: Empirical echo of elite-opinion vs. mass-opinion divides; resonates with Lippmann-style worries about the mass public and with Zaller’s RAS model where the least-attentive shift most.
• SEED: Possible angle: ‘Low-information citizens as the true swing voters in presidential power’ — recasting democratic accountability via who actually moves approval numbers.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1628