The mass media, election campaigning and voter response

Focusing on capital-intensive polities, election campaign advertising in the paid and unpaid media is analysed for its impact on voters, as part of a suite of influences commonly seen to affect voter behaviour. The Australian experience from the 1990 federal election campaign supports a modest impact thesis, that campaign news, advertising and related activities reported in the mass media are significant among a number of secondary determinants operating beneath a primary, partisan influence on how most people vote. However, identification of subsets of voters - committed, wavering and swinging (changing), stable, volatile - shows that media-related influences impact differently on each subset, both absolutely and in the degree to which they act in a reinforcing or persuading role.