The Messenger Matters: Candidate-Media Agenda Convergence and Its Effects on Voter Issue Salience.

A large literature in political science and communications demonstrates that candidates and the news media can influence the importance voters ascribe to political issues. Little work, however, has sought to compare the agenda-setting influence of each group of actors -- candidates and journalists. Nor do scholars have a good understanding of how the ability of candidates to set the public's agenda varies in campaigns with different levels of candidate-media issue convergence, and whether certain individual-level characteristics, such as partisanship and trust in the media, make some people more susceptible to candidate or media influence. In this paper, I explore these matters with an experiment conducted during the early stages of the 2006 Texas gubernatorial election. I find the media to be more effective than candidates in affecting the salience individuals ascribe to political issues. Not surprisingly, the strongest effects emerge when news reports and campaign communications converge on the same agenda, suggesting the benefit to candidates when the media reflect their issue priorities. In addition, those with higher levels of trust in the media are slightly more susceptible to news effects, and Democrats appear somewhat more receptive to their candidate's preferred issue agenda. The findings point to the continued role of news coverage in shaping public opinion and the value in understanding the relationship between candidates and the media. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]