Zuma-Arbeitsbericht 96/01 How to Test ‘Real ’ Campaign Effects: Linking Survey Data to Content Analytical Data

In electoral campaign research we usually find two different approaches depending on what discipline the researcher is coming from. Political scientists usually study campaign effects by looking at variables such as candidate evaluations or issues. If these attitudes change over the period of a campaign (by holding other intervening factors constant) the effects are attributed to the actual campaign messages, campaign coverage, advertisements etc. Communication researchers, on the other hand, are often looking at the actual coverage of campaigns and try to interpret the election outcome in view of the campaign battle as it was fought in the media. Both approaches suffer from the deficit of not looking at both, the content of the campaign coverage as well as the survey answers of the respondents. In this paper we are trying to bring both approaches together. First, a detailed content analysis of the German election campaign of 1990 will provide the actual data of what was covered, and how it was covered in the campaign. These data are then linked to a survey of that time period. The data stem from the German part of an international project (which involves researchers from the US, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and Spain). This project gathered unique data on media usage, political attitudes, and the probably most extensive content analysis up-to-date. It provides us with methodological opportunities to test models of communication effects which until now was not possible with most data sets on electora