Core Values and Priming Effects in Electoral Campaigns

Core values, which can be defined as abstract prescriptive beliefs about government and society, help ordinary citizens to reason about politics in a principled and efficacious manner. As such, core values have appeal for mass politics and representative democracy. To fulfill this role, core values should possess several characteristics. Chief among these are resistance to elite influence and trans-situationalism, that is, the ability to guide political evaluations across different contexts. Despite their importance for mass politics, it is unclear as to how well core values fulfill these criteria. I examine this here by testing whether core values can be systematically primed by electoral campaigns. That is, I test whether core values can be made, by political elites, to matter more in certain situations over others. I do this by using observational data from the 2012 and 2016 ANES, along with data from a nationally representative survey experiment, originally fielded in 2005. Overall, I find little evidence to suggest that electoral campaigns can prime citizens' core values. These findings have implications for our understanding of value systems, electoral campaigns, and public opinion.

Automated summary

Core values, defined as abstract beliefs about government and society, play a crucial role in enabling citizens to reason about politics. However, research shows that electoral campaigns have limited effect on activating citizens' core values.